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Tracing Setup

Tracing

Gloo Edge makes it easy to implement tracing on your system through Envoy’s tracing capabilities.

Usage

If you have not yet enabled tracing, please see the configuration details below.

Configuration

There are two steps to make tracing available through Gloo Edge:

  1. Specify a trace provider in the bootstrap config
  2. Enable tracing on the listener
  3. (Optional) Annotate routes with descriptors
1. Specify a tracing provider in the bootstrap config

The bootstrap config is the portion of Envoy’s config that is applied when an Envoy process in intialized. That means that you must either apply this configuration through Helm values during installation or that you must edit the proxy’s config map and restart the pod. We describe both methods below.

Several tracing providers are supported. You can choose any that is supported by Envoy. For a list of supported tracing providers and the configuration that they expect, please see Envoy’s documentation on trace provider configuration. For demonstration purposes, we show how to specify the helm values for a zipkin trace provider below.

Note: some tracing providers, such as Zipkin, require a collector_cluster (the cluster which collects the traces) to be specified in the bootstrap config. If your provider requires a cluster to be specified, you can provide it in the config, as shown below. If your provider does not require a cluster you should omit that field.

Option 1: Set the trace provider through helm values:

gatewayProxies:
  gatewayProxy:
    tracing:
      provider:
        name: envoy.tracers.zipkin
        typed_config:
          "@type": "type.googleapis.com/envoy.config.trace.v2.ZipkinConfig"
          collector_cluster: zipkin
          collector_endpoint: "/api/v2/spans"
          collector_endpoint_version: HTTP_JSON
      cluster:
        - name: zipkin
          connect_timeout: 1s
          type: STRICT_DNS
          load_assignment:
            cluster_name: zipkin
            endpoints:
            - lb_endpoints:
              - endpoint:
                  address:
                    socket_address:
                      address: zipkin
                      port_value: 1234

When you install Gloo Edge using these Helm values, Envoy will be configured with the tracing provider you specified.

Option 2: Set the trace provider by editing the config map:

First, edit the config map pertaining to your proxy. This should be gateway-proxy-envoy-config in the gloo-system namespace.

kubectl edit configmap -n gloo-system gateway-proxy-envoy-config

Apply the tracing provider changes. A sample Zipkin configuration is shown below.

apiVersion: v1
kind: ConfigMap
data:
  envoy.yaml:
    tracing:
      http:
        name: envoy.tracers.zipkin
        typed_config:
          "@type": "type.googleapis.com/envoy.config.trace.v2.ZipkinConfig"
          collector_cluster: zipkin
          collector_endpoint: "/api/v2/spans"
          collector_endpoint_version: HTTP_JSON
    node:
      cluster: gateway
      id: "{{.PodName}}{{.PodNamespace}}"
      metadata:
        role: "{{.PodNamespace}}~gateway-proxy"
    static_resources:
      listeners:
        - name: prometheus_listener
          address:
            socket_address:
              address: 0.0.0.0
              port_value: 8081
          filter_chains:
            - filters:
                - name: envoy.filters.network.http_connection_manager
                  typed_config:
                    "@type": type.googleapis.com/envoy.extensions.filters.network.http_connection_manager.v3.HttpConnectionManager
                    codec_type: AUTO
                    stat_prefix: prometheus
                    route_config: # collapsed for brevity
                    http_filters:
                      - name: envoy.filters.http.router
      clusters:
        - name: xds_cluster
          connect_timeout: 5.000s
          load_assignment:
            cluster_name: xds_cluster
            endpoints:
            - lb_endpoints:
              - endpoint:
                  address:
                    socket_address:
                      address: gloo
                      port_value: 9977
          http2_protocol_options: {}
          type: STRICT_DNS
        - name: zipkin
          connect_timeout: 1s
          type: STRICT_DNS
          load_assignment:
            cluster_name: zipkin
            endpoints:
            - lb_endpoints:
              - endpoint:
                  address:
                    socket_address:
                      address: zipkin
                      port_value: 1234

To apply the bootstrap config to Envoy we need to restart the process. An easy way to do this is with kubectl delete pod.

kubectl delete pod -n gloo-system gateway-proxy-[suffix]

When the gateway-proxy pod restarts it should have the new trace provider config.

2. Enable tracing on the listener

After you have installed Gloo Edge with a tracing provider, you can enable tracing on a listener-by-listener basis. Gloo Edge exposes this feature through a listener plugin. Please see the tracing listener plugin docs for details on how to enable tracing on a listener.

3. (Optional) Annotate routes with descriptors

In order to associate a trace with a route, it can be helpful to annotate your routes with a descriptive name. This can be applied to the route, via a route plugin, or provided through a header x-envoy-decorator-operation. If both means are used, the header’s value will override the routes’s value.

You can set a route descriptor with kubectl edit virtualservice -n gloo-system [name-of-vs]. Edit your virtual service as shown below.

apiVersion: gateway.solo.io/v1
kind: VirtualService
metadata: # collapsed for brevity
spec:
  virtualHost:
    domains:
    - '*'
    routes:
    - matchers:
      - exact: /abc
      routeAction:
        single:
          upstream:
            name: my-upstream
            namespace: gloo-system
      options:
        tracing:
          routeDescriptor: my-route-from-abc-jan-01
        prefixRewrite: /
status: # collapsed for brevity