How-To: Set up Jaeger for distributed tracing

Jaeger is an open-source distributed tracing system. It helps gather timing data needed to troubleshoot latency problems in microservice architectures. It manages both the collection and lookup of this data.

The following steps show you how to configure the Radius control plane to send distributed tracing data to Jaeger running as a container in your Kubernetes cluster and how to view the data.

Pre-requisites

• kubectl CLI

Step 1: Install Jaeger on Kubernetes

1. Create the namespace radius-monitoring:

   kubectl create namespace radius-monitoring
   

2. Create the file jaeger.yaml, and paste the following YAML:

   Download jaeger.yaml
   
   

3. Install Jaeger:

   kubectl apply -f jaeger.yaml
   

4. Wait for Jaeger to be up and running

   kubectl wait deploy --selector app=jaeger --for=condition=available -n radius-monitoring
   

Step 2: Configure Radius control plane

1. Install the Radius control plane with your Zipkin endpoint set to your Jaeger collector endpoint using rad install kubernetes:

   rad install kubernetes --set  global.zipkin.url=http://jaeger-collector.radius-monitoring.svc.cluster.local:9411/api/v2/spans
   

   Note: http://jaeger-collector.radius-monitoring.svc.cluster.local:9411/api/v2/spans is the default URL for Jaeger when installed using the above instructions. If you have changed the service name or namespace, use that instead.

Step 3: View Tracing Data

1. Port forward the Jaeger service to your local machine:

   kubectl port-forward svc/tracing 16686 -n radius-monitoring
   

2. In your browser, go to http://localhost:16686 to see the Jaeger UI:

   

References

• Jaeger Getting Started