Tracing with Zipkin

Zipkin is an open source distributed tracing system. It offers the ability to search for traces by identifier (ID), service, operation, or tags, and shows the dependencies between services. You can learn more at https://zipkin.io/.

These are the steps we will follow to set up Zipkin in Dapr on Kubernetes:

1. Setting up Zipkin
2. Configuring tracing with Zipkin
3. Enabling tracing in Dapr
4. Investigating with Zipkin

Let’s start by installing Zipkin in the cluster we prepared in Chapter 9, Deploying to Kubernetes.

Setting up Zipkin

Zipkin is distributed as a Docker container. You probably already have it on your local development environment, as it has been installed by default with Dapr.

We can deploy it to Kubernetes with the following Deploy\deploy-zipkin.yaml file:

apiVersion:  apps/v1
kind:  Deployment
metadata:
    name:  zipkin
    labels:
  ...