Important: This documentation is about an older version. It's relevant only to the release noted, many of the features and functions have been updated or replaced. Please view the current version.

Data sources

Zipkin

Grafana Cloud Enterprise Open source

Zipkin data source

Grafana ships with built-in support for Zipkin, an open source, distributed tracing system.

For instructions on how to add a data source to Grafana, refer to the administration documentation. Only users with the organization administrator role can add data sources. Administrators can also configure the data source via YAML with Grafana’s provisioning system.

Once you’ve added the Zipkin data source, you can configure it so that your Grafana instance’s users can create queries in its query editor when they build dashboards and use Explore.

Configure the data source

To access the data source configuration page:

Hover the cursor over the Configuration (gear) icon.
Select Data Sources.
Select the Zipkin data source.

Set the data source’s basic configuration options carefully:

Name	Description
Name	Sets the name you use to refer to the data source in panels and queries.
Default	Defines whether this data source is pre-selected for new panels.
URL	Sets the URL of the Zipkin instance, such as `http://localhost:9411`.
Basic Auth	Enables basic authentication for the Zipkin data source.
User	Defines the user name for basic authentication.
Password	Defines the password for basic authentication.

Configure trace to logs

Screenshot of the trace to logs settings

Note: Available in Grafana v7.4 and higher.

The Trace to logs setting configures the trace to logs feature that is available when you integrate Grafana with Zipkin.

To configure trace to logs:

Select the target data source.
Select which tags to use in the logs query. The tags you configure must be present in the spans attributes or resources for a trace to logs span link to appear.
- Single tag
  - Configuring job as a tag and clicking on a span link will take you to your configured logs datasource with the query {job='value from clicked span'}.
- Multiple tags
  - If multiple tags are used they will be concatenated so the logs query would look like {job='value from clicked span', service='value from clicked span'}.
- Mapped tags
  - For a mapped tag service.name with value service, clicking on a span link will take you to your configured logs datasource with the query {service='value from clicked span'} instead of {service.name='value from clicked span'}.
  - This is useful for instances where your tracing datasource tags and your logs datasource tags don’t match one-to-one.

The following table describes the ways in which you can configure your trace to logs settings:

Name	Description
Data source	Sets the target data source.
Tags	Defines the tags to use in the logs query. Default is `'cluster', 'hostname', 'namespace', 'pod'`.
Map tag names	Enables configuring how Jaeger tag names map to logs label names. For example, map `service.name` to `service`.
Span start time shift	Shifts the start time for the logs query based on the span start time. To extend to the past, use a negative value. Use time interval units like `5s`, `1m`, `3h`. Default is `0`.
Span end time shift	Shifts the end time for the logs query based on the span end time. Use time interval units. Default is `0`.
Filter by Trace ID	Toggles whether to append the trace ID to the logs query.
Filter by Span ID	Toggles whether to append the span ID to the logs query.

Configure trace to metrics

Note: This feature is behind the traceToMetrics feature toggle.

The Trace to metrics section configures the trace to metrics feature.

Use the settings to select the target Prometheus data source, and create any desired linked queries.

Setting name	Description
Data source	Defines the target data source.
Tags	Defines the tags used in linked queries. The key sets the span attribute name, and the optional value sets the corresponding metric label name. For example, you can map `k8s.pod` to `pod`. To interpolate these tags into queries, use the `$__tags` keyword.

Each linked query consists of:

Link Label: (Optional) Descriptive label for the linked query.
Query: The query ran when navigating from a trace to the metrics data source. Interpolate tags using the $__tags keyword. For example, when you configure the query requests_total{$__tags}with the tags k8s.pod=pod and cluster, the result looks like requests_total{pod="nginx-554b9", cluster="us-east-1"}.

Enable Node Graph

The Node Graph setting enables the Node Graph visualization, which is disabled by default.

Once enabled, Grafana displays the Node Graph after loading the trace view.

Configure the span bar label

The Span bar label section helps you display additional information in the span bar row.

You can choose one of three options:

Name	Description
None	Adds nothing to the span bar row.
Duration	(Default) Displays the span duration on the span bar row.
Tag	Displays the span tag on the span bar row. You must also specify which tag key to use to get the tag value, such as `span.kind`.

Query traces

You can query and display traces from Zipkin via Explore.

This topic explains configuration and queries specific to the Zipkin data source. For general documentation on querying data sources in Grafana, see Query and transform data.

To query by trace ID, enter it.

Screenshot of the Zipkin query editor with trace selector expanded

To select a particular trace from all traces logged in the time range you have selected in Explore, you can also query by trace selector. The trace selector has three levels of nesting:

The service you’re interested in.
Particular operation, part of the selected service
Specific trace in which the selected operation occurred, represented by the root operation name and trace duration

View data mapping in the trace UI

You can view Zipkin annotations in the trace view as logs with annotation value displayed under the annotation key.

Upload a JSON trace file

You can upload a JSON file that contains a single trace and visualize it. If the file has multiple traces, Grafana visualizes its first trace.

Screenshot of the Zipkin data source in explore with upload selected

Trace JSON example

[
  {
    "traceId": "efe9cb8857f68c8f",
    "parentId": "efe9cb8857f68c8f",
    "id": "8608dc6ce5cafe8e",
    "kind": "SERVER",
    "name": "get /api",
    "timestamp": 1627975249601797,
    "duration": 23457,
    "localEndpoint": { "serviceName": "backend", "ipv4": "127.0.0.1", "port": 9000 },
    "tags": {
      "http.method": "GET",
      "http.path": "/api",
      "jaxrs.resource.class": "Resource",
      "jaxrs.resource.method": "printDate"
    },
    "shared": true
  }
]