microservice-pattern-distributed-tracing

This repository serves to demonstrate how to trace calls between services in a microservice environment. This is particularly important to analyze traffic flow and to identify API bottlenecks and performance issues. Do note that tracing and logging are separated on purpose. Tools such as ELK stack should be preferred for distributed logging purpose.

How to run

Using docker:

Simply run start-docker.bat;

Using docker-compose:

Simply run start-compose.bat

How to test

1. Make a call to employee-service by visiting http://localhost:9080/employees
2. Check zipkin at http://localhost:9411/zipkin. Click Run Query and then select the first span to view detail. You should see this:

1. It shows that call to employee-service's GET /employees took 366ms.
2. It shows that employee-service called inventory-service's GET /inventories REST resource.
3. It shows that inventory-service made a connection to database and executed some queries.

protip, if you click on the span with jdbc prefix then you can see these details:

Sql executed

total rows returned

Libraries

1. spring-cloud-starter-zipkin contains both Sleuth (add tracing using MDC) and Zipkin (send trace to zipkin server).
2. p6spy-spring-boot-starter will create proxies that allow JDBC calls to be intercepted and reported to zipkin.

Tool learnings

docker

1. It seems that there are no official alpine version of jdk8+ available and that causes image size to increase. Base image that's currently used is not officially supported by alpine.
2. If we're running everything in this repo using docker only, a container can reach another container by connecting to http://host.docker.internal:port instead of http://localhost:post. It seems that host.docker.internal is a special DNS name that resolves to the host machine (a.k.a, the host machine's localhost).
3. It's helpful to run a container with name supplied e.g., docker run -d --name coolName imageName. One can then stop container using name instead of container id e.g., docker top coolName

docker-compose

1. In docker-compose, we don't need to host.docker.internal. Instead, we connect to a particular container using the container's service name defined in docker-compose.yaml.
2. When connecting from one container to another in docker-compose, remember to point to the container(service)'s container port instead of host port

version: "3.8"
services:
  employee: # 'employee' is the 'service-name'
    image: aurelius0523/employee-service
    ports:
      - 9080:8080 
  inventory: # 'inventory' is also 'service name'
    image: aurelius0523/inventory-service
    ports:
      - 9081:8081 # if employee-service needs to call inventory-service, the url will be http://inventory/8081