Zipkin

The Instana host agent can ingest Zipkin tracing data, in both v1 and v2 of the Zipkin trace format.

Setup

  1. Install the Instana host agent on the same host as the processes that emit Zipkin traces.
  2. Configure the HTTP Collector of Zipkin to send traces to port 42699 of the host agent. An example value for a host-local process looks like http://localhost:42699/api/v2/spans. The configuration is done differently for different Zipkin-instrumented projects. Therefore, refer to the respective documentation where the endpoint setting is usually mentioned.

Infrastructure correlation

From the host agent 1.1.582, Zipkin tracing data that the host agent receives is correlated with the process that sends them, if the following preconditions are met:

  • The host agent is running on a Linux system with the following commands available: lsns, nsenter, and ss.
  • The process that sends the tracing data is running on the same host as the host agent.
  • The process that sends the tracing data is not ignored with the Ignore Processes capability.
  • Traces are reported directly to the host agent, rather than running over a proxy, such as OpenTelemetry Collector. If the tracing data goes over a proxy, the proxy is associated with the traces instead.

The Application Perspective Service dashboard correctly references any process from which related traces were ingested, including, for example, infrastructure changes that took place for this service.

If any of these preconditions is not fulfilled, the tracing data is correlated with the host on which the host agent is running.

Known limitations

  • The tracing data that is collected from Zipkin is not correlated with the tracing data that is collected by using AutoTrace, resulting in separate traces even if the systems traced by Zipkin and Instana AutoTrace, respectively, were directly interacting with one another.

  • Zipkin has no notion of user monitoring (although this might eventually change with the adoption of W3C TraceContext). As such, beacons that are collected with Instana Website monitoring are not correlated with backend traces that are collected from Zipkin.

  • The host agent supports the collection of Zipkin traces only over HTTP, which corresponds to the COLLECTOR_HTTP_ENABLED setting of Zipkin.