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# OpenTracing

Using the third party module opentracing-contrib/nginx-opentracing the NGINX ingress controller can configure NGINX to enable OpenTracing instrumentation. By default this feature is disabled.

To enable the instrumentation we just need to enable the instrumentation in the configuration configmap and set the host where we should send the traces.

In the rnburn/zipkin-date-server github repository is an example of a dockerized date service. To install the example and zipkin collector run:

    kubectl create -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rnburn/zipkin-date-server/master/kubernetes/zipkin.yaml
    kubectl create -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rnburn/zipkin-date-server/master/kubernetes/deployment.yaml

Also we need to configure the NGINX controller configmap with the required values:

    $ echo '
    apiVersion: v1
    kind: ConfigMap
    data:
      enable-opentracing: "true"
      zipkin-collector-host: zipkin.default.svc.cluster.local
    metadata:
      name: nginx-configuration
      namespace: ingress-nginx
      labels:
        app: ingress-nginx
    ' | kubectl replace -f -

Using curl we can generate some traces:

    $ curl -v http://$(minikube ip)
    $ curl -v http://$(minikube ip)

In the zipkin interface we can see the details: