Zipkin: Possibility to start tracing from apache http reverse proxy.

[kmalecki]

I have a situation where:

[Apache http proxy] -> [micro-service structure**(created traceId/spanId)**].

I need to start tracing requests from Apache server to bind logs from Apache to logs from micro-servces.
So, when request is authorized in Apache proxy, and log is created, i need to have traceId correlated to this request,:

[Apache http proxy**(created traceId/spanId)**] -> [micro-service structure**(passed tracedId from Apache)**]

Is there any possibility to force Zipkin to trace incoming requests, starting from Apache http server proxy?

[adriancole]

I've not heard of anyone making an apache module as yet. right now, linkerd might be the only known reverse proxy that has builtin zipkin support.

[jcarres-mdsol]

We use nginx but same situation, it would be great if we could use trace_ids. Maybe this issue should be moved somewhere else thought as it is not related to the ruby client.

[jcarres-mdsol]

BTW @kmalecki maybe you would be interested on this https://github.com/JordiPolo/lorekeeper
We have a middleware which takes the trace Ids and put it in here so we have nice json formatted log messages with trace_ids. It may be too much depending on how much are you building around querying your logs but it can be a life-saver.

[mjbryant]

I am also interested in an Apache module to properly start a Zipkin trace. We currently generate Apache spans quite hackily by having Apache log certain Zipkin headers and generating the spans entirely out-of-band. It is very difficult to maintain, though probably has lower in-band overhead.

[kmalecki]

I think that the only solution is to generate trace id by a module for apache and add header to request. Unfortunately there is no available module, that can generate such thing.
Thank You All for tips.
I will not close this issue yet, maybe I or someone else will find something else.

[adammichalik]

If it helps anyone, I achieved the above using mod_unique_id and mod_headers:

RequestHeader setifempty X-B3-TraceId "expr=%{md5:%{reqenv:UNIQUE_ID}}"
RequestHeader edit X-B3-TraceId "^(.{0,16}).*$" "$1"

%{reqenv:UNIQUE_ID} is a unique string generated by mod_unique_id. Then, it gets MD5-hashed and assigned to the X-B3-TraceId header. This gives a 32-character hex string = 128 bit traceId. Since my downstream libraries require the traceIds to be 64-bit, the RequestHeader edit extracts the first 16 characters (64 bit) from the value and reassigns it back to the X-B3-TraceId header which is sent downstream.

[adriancole]

awesome thanks for sharing @adammichalik!

[jorgheymans]

Does this warrant a small README.md blurb in https://github.com/openzipkin/brave/tree/master/instrumentation/apache-httpd or possibly https://github.com/openzipkin-contrib/apache-httpd ?

[adriancole]

maybe in b3 propagation repo, I guess, as it isn't java specific?