rb-opentracers

A set of Ruby-compatible tracers conforming to the OpenTracing API. Supported reporters include:

• Logging, which logs via any Logger-compatible logger.
• Zipkin, which sends spans to a Zipkin server.
• AppDash (currently unfinished), which sends spans to an AppDash server.

The opentracing gem itself includes a no-op Tracer (OpenTracing.global_tracer = OpenTracing::Tracer.new), so one is not provided here.

This gem is (intended to be) thread-safe and deadlock-free.

Installation

Configuration

1. Decide on a reporter. Each one requires different configuration. E.g. my_reporter = Tracer::Reporter::Logging.new(logger: Logger.new('trace_log.out'), log_level: :debug)
2. In the case of a multi-process server, you want to set up your tracer after the worker boots. Unicorn and Puma provide facilities to do this. Reporters are written to be thread-safe, so no special handling is necessary in the case of new threads.
3. To set your tracer; OpenTracing::global_tracer = ::Tracer::Tracer.new(reporter: my_reporter)

Usage

The OpenTracing API is available.

While not included in the gem, some potentially useful helper methods can be seen at https://gist.github.com/xxx/3b9f6d8ab057507df608f390ed0ec394.

Status

• Currently hackerware. There are no tests, and I have no idea if I'm correctly mapping OpenTracing concepts to the various backends.

• Tracers and reporters are thread safe, but not fork safe. If you are forking processes, you'll need to clear the spans from the child process' reporter, or you'll get duplicate spans reported. In the case of some application servers, they offer hooks to run after a new process forks, so you could use that to reinitialize the tracer entirely.

• The Appdash reporter is unfinished, and completely broken at the moment.

Contributing

• Feel free to send pull requests.

• Don't be a dick. If a contributor to this project is being one, feel free to contact me (@xxx) privately via any mechanism. I'm not tolerant of jerks, and will remove them from the project immediately, regardless of past contributions.

Acknowledgements

• OpenTracing
  • Without which, we wouldn't be here.
• appdash-rb
  • A bunch of the protobuf handling was taken directly from here.
• lightstep
  • I took inspiration, and code for injecting and extracting spans from this already-OT-compatible gem. It also includes an example of a fork-safe reporter, should you want to add that locally.

License

See LICENSE.txt (tl;dr: MIT)