Distributed Tracing with Sleuth and Zipkin

Distributed tracing is essential for understanding and debugging interactions between microservices. Spring Cloud Sleuth and Zipkin let you follow requests across your entire architecture.

1. Basic Configuration

1.1 Adding the Dependencies

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.springframework.cloud</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-cloud-starter-sleuth</artifactId>
</dependency>
<dependency>
    <groupId>org.springframework.cloud</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-cloud-sleuth-zipkin</artifactId>
</dependency>

1.2 Configuring Sleuth

# application.yml
spring:
  application:
    name: product-service
  sleuth:
    otel:
      config:
        trace-id-ratio-based: 1.0
    propagation:
      type: w3c
    sampler:
      probability: 1.0
  zipkin:
    base-url: http://localhost:9411
    sender:
      type: web

2. Configuring Zipkin

2.1 Installing Zipkin

docker run -d -p 9411:9411 openzipkin/zipkin

2.2 Configuring the Services

# application.yml
spring:
  zipkin:
    base-url: http://localhost:9411
    sender:
      type: web
    service:
      name: ${spring.application.name}