Distributed Tracing in Spring Boot with Zipkin and Sleuth

Problem

In microservices, tracing requests across services is hard without context propagation.

Solution: Sleuth + Zipkin

• Sleuth adds trace IDs to logs
• Zipkin stores and visualizes traces

Add Dependencies

xmlCopy
<dependency>
  <groupId>org.springframework.cloud</groupId>
  <artifactId>spring-cloud-starter-zipkin</artifactId>
</dependency>

Sample Trace Log

logCopy
[TraceId: 45df... SpanId: 13ff...] Received request at /order/checkout

Run Zipkin

bashCopy
docker run -d -p 9411:9411 openzipkin/zipkin

Enable in application.yml

yamlCopy
spring:
  zipkin:
    base-url: http://localhost:9411
  sleuth:
    sampler:
      probability: 1.0

Zipkin UI

TL;DR

With 2 lines of config, you can trace requests across services and monitor latency bottlenecks.