Enabling Zipkin tracing

Page last updated:

Zipkin is a tracing system that enables app developers to troubleshoot failures or latency issues. Zipkin provides the ability to trace requests and responses across distributed systems. For more information, see Zipkin.io.

To enable Zipkin tracing, add the following property to your BOSH deployment manifest file:

properties:
  router:
    tracing:
      enable_zipkin: true

For more information about how the Gorouter works with HTTP headers and Zipkin tracing, see the HTTP Headers section of the HTTP Routing topic.

To trace app requests and responses in Cloud Foundry Application Runtime, apps must also log Zipkin headers.

After adding Zipkin HTTP headers to app logs, developers can use cf logs myapp to correlate the trace and span IDs logged by the Gorouter with the trace IDs logged by their app. To correlate trace IDs for a request through multiple apps, each app must forward appropriate values for the headers with requests to other apps.