Tracer – Zipping through time
Tracer is a distributed tracing system, designed after
Dapper. The
instrumentation is compatible with the
OpenTracing specification.
Status
Tracer is currently in alpha state. It is in a working state, but very
much unfinished, hardly tested and will contain bugs. You're welcome
to test it, though!
Quickstart
The following steps will install Tracer, the Tracer UI and set up
PostgreSQL to be used as a storage backend.
The following software is required:
- Go 1.6 or later for building Tracer
- PostgreSQL 9.5 or later for the storage engine
Installation
go get github.com/tracer/tracer/cmd/tracer
go get github.com/tracer/tracer-ui/cmd/tracer-ui
Configuration
Create a PostgreSQL user and schema for Tracer and import the file
$GOPATH/src/github.com/tracer/tracer/storage/postgres/schema.sql.
The example configuration uses the username and password tracer and
the database postgres, but you're free to edit the config.
Now you can start Tracer and its UI:
cp $GOPATH/src/github.com/tracer/tracer/cmd/tracer/example.conf .
# possibly edit example.conf
$GOPATH/bin/tracer -c example.conf &
$GOPATH/bin/tracer-ui -t $GOPATH/src/github.com/tracer/tracer-ui/zipkin-ui &
To insert a basic demo trace, run
go run $GOPATH/src/github.com/tracer/tracer/cmd/demo/demo.go
To view the UI, point your browser at http://localhost:9997/.
If you want to add instrumentation to your own code, check out
OpenTracing and
opentracing-go
for the API. To instantiate a Tracer instance that logs to the server
you just started, write something like this:
import "github.com/tracer/tracer"
...
storage, err := tracer.NewGRPC("localhost:9999", &tracer.GRPCOptions{
QueueSize: 1024,
FlushInterval: 1 * time.Second,
}, grpc.WithInsecure())
if err != nil {
log.Fatal(err)
}
t := tracer.NewTracer("frontend", storage, tracer.RandomID{})
This will create a tracer t that sends traces via gRPC to your server.
For more information on Tracer's instrumentation API check
godoc.org.