Introduction to Spring Boot Sleuth and Zipkin

Introduction :

Spring Cloud Sleuth is a distributed tracing solution for Spring Boot applications. It helps track and visualize requests as they travel through different components of a microservices architecture. Sleuth integrates with other tools like Zipkin and Jaeger to provide a comprehensive view of the distributed system.

In this tutorial, we will explore the basics of Spring Boot Sleuth and demonstrate how to set it up in a Spring Boot application.

Prerequisites

1. Basic knowledge of Spring Boot.
2. A Spring Boot project (you can create one using Spring Initializer).
3. A Zipkin or Jaeger server running (optional, but recommended for tracing visualization).

Step 1: Add Sleuth Dependency

Open your pom.xml file and add the Sleuth dependency:

Step 2: Configure Sleuth

In your application.properties or application.yml file, add the following Sleuth configuration:

This sets the sampling probability to 1.0, meaning all requests will be traced. Adjust the probability if you want to sample only a fraction of requests.

Step 3: Create a Sample Controller

Create a simple Spring MVC controller to simulate a microservice:

Step 4: Run Your Application

Run your Spring Boot application. Visit http://localhost:8080/api/hello in your browser to trigger a request.

Step 5: View Traces (Optional)

If you have Zipkin or Jaeger running, you can view traces generated by Sleuth. Open your tracing server’s dashboard (e.g., http://localhost:9411 for Zipkin) and search for traces related to your application.

Step 6: Analyze the Trace

Each trace will show the journey of a request through various components of your microservices architecture. You can see the time taken by each component, dependencies, and more.

Conclusion

You have successfully integrated Spring Boot Sleuth into your application. Distributed tracing helps you identify performance bottlenecks and troubleshoot issues in a microservices environment. Explore additional features of Sleuth, such as customizing trace IDs or integrating with other tracing systems, to enhance your monitoring capabilities.