Distributed Request Tracing using Zipkin and Spring Boot Sleuth

Modern cloud computing systems have brought scalability and agility by enabling the creation of microservices with the implementation of the service-oriented architecture (SOA) or a fine-grained microservice architecture (MSA).While the creation of microservices provides the agility for the development, it also brings complexity to the flow request and response tracing system-wide.Isolation of faults and the origin of the issue becomes a daunting task.Since the services can potentially be distributed on multi cloud environments, tracing the flow and sequence of calls in the inter service communication is quite challenging.Without the innovative mechanisms, the service faults cannot be located.Request tracing is a concept where a unique identifier is tagged at the origin and persisted all the way in the flow of information till the life cycle of the request ends.Request tracing is complex but can be possible with the help of some distribution tracing software.This paper attempts to throw some light on the flow of data in a distributed service environment and innovative approaches for tracing the request flows.