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Distributed Tracing

Configuring Distributed Tracing (DT) will enable you to obtain a visualization of the call paths that take place in order to process a request made to Kratos. It's yet another tool that you can use to aid you in profiling, debugging and ultimately understanding your deployment of Kratos better. Kratos supports the following tracing options:

  • Tracing backend(s): Jaeger, Elastic APM, Datadog, Zipkin and Instana - Note: adding support for other opentracing compliant backends is planned. To aid in priority, please create an issue with your feature request.
  • Following existing traces: If you have deployed Kratos behind a proxy that has initiated a trace, Kratos will attempt to join that trace by examining the request headers for tracing context.

What a Kratos trace includes​

In DT speak, a trace is comprised of one or more spans which are logical units of work. Each Kratos span is encapsulated with the following state:

  • A name
  • A start time
  • A finish time
  • A set of zero or more tags

Kratos creates the following spans:

  • Top level span (named after the request path) for the requested endpoint. Span tags: - http method - http status code - error IFF status code >= 400
  • Child span will be created if bcrypt is called. Span tags: - bcrypt work factor
  • All SQL database interactions. Spans/tags will vary depending on the database driver used.

This is still evolving and subject to change as tracing support continues to expand in Kratos. If you see something that's missing/wrong, please create an issue.