Spring Cloud Sleuth Samples

Running the samples

There are a few samples with slightly different features. You can run all of them from an IDE via the main method, or on the command line with mvn spring-boot:run. They all log trace and span data on the console by default. Here’s a list:

• spring-cloud-sleuth-sample: vanilla (no zipkin) web app that calls back to itself on various endpoints ("/", "/call", "/async")

• spring-cloud-sleuth-sample-zipkin: same as vanilla sample but with zipkin (set sample.zipkin.enabled=true if you have a collector running)

• spring-cloud-sleuth-sample-stream: same as vanilla sample, but exports span data to RabbitMQ using Spring Cloud Stream

• spring-cloud-sleuth-sample-stream-zipkin: a consumer for the span data on RabbitMQ that pushes it into a Zipkin span store, so it can be queried and visualized using the embedded Zipkin UI.

• spring-cloud-sleuth-sample-messaging: a Spring Integration application with two HTTP endpoints ("/" and "/xform")

• spring-cloud-sleuth-sample-ribbon: two endpoints ("/" and "/call") that make calls to the "zipkin" sample via Ribbon. Also has `@EnableZUulProxy" so if the other samples are running they are proxied at "/messaging", "/zipkin", "/vanilla" (see "/routes" for a list).

The Ribbon sample makes an interesting demo or playground for learning about zipkin. In the screenshot below you can see a trace with 3 spans - it starts in the "testSleuthRibbon" app and crosses to "testSleuthMessaging" for the next 2 spans.

Running samples with Zipkin

1. Optionally run the Zipkin Server, e.g. via docker compose (there’s a docker-compose.yml in Spring Cloud Sleuth, or in Docker Zipkin

2. Run the zipkin sample application (set sample.zipkin.enabled=false if you have no Zipkin running). If you are using a VM to run docker you might need to tunnel port 9411 to localhost, or change the spring.zipkin.baseUrl.

3. Hit http://localhost:3380, http://localhost:3380/call, http://localhost:3380/async for some interesting sample traces (the app callas back to itself).

4. Go to http://localhost:9411 for Zipkin’s UI (if you are using boot2docker the host will be different)

Note	You can see the zipkin spans without the UI (in logs) if you run the sample with sample.zipkin.enabled=false.

The fact that the first trace in says "testSleuthMessaging" seems to be a bug in the UI (it has some annotations from that service, but it originates in the "testSleuthRibbon" service).

Running samples with Zipkin Stream

Instead of POSTing trace data directly to a Zipkin server, you can export them over Spring Cloud Stream.

1. Run the RabbitMQ middleware for Zipkin (you can use docker-compose.yml).

2. Build the Zipkin Stream sample with Maven and run it.

3. Run the spring-cloud-sleuth-sample-stream app and interact with it in a browser, just like the vanilla sample. If you are using a VM to run docker you might need to tunnel port 5672 to localhost, or change the spring.rabbbitmq.host.

4. Go to http://localhost:9411 for Zipkin’s UI

The UI should look more or less like this: