Eclipse MicroProfile OpenTracing

The Open Tracing API was created to allow easier tracing of the flow of a request in microservices environment across service boundaries.

A full overview for the reasoning behind the API can be found in the README of the MicroProfile OpenTracing source code repository.

The complete specification is maintained in the same repository.

Since Payara Platform 4.1.2.183 and 5.183

The Payara Platform implementation of the io.opentracing.Tracer interface supports the following carriers:

Since Payara Server 5.192

The Payara Platform’s MicroProfile implementation supports tracing of requests that are handled by SOAP Web Services implemented via the JAX-WS API. Since JAX-WS is only supported on Payara Server Full Profile, this support is not covered on Payara Micro.

Since Payara Server 5.194

If you wish to use an alternative implementation of OpenTracing, i.e. Jaeger, then the alternative implementation must be provided as a jar in the lib directory of your domain. In it must be a file named io.opentracing.Tracer under META-INF/services, with the name of the class implementing io.opentracing.Tracer. That implementation must have a no-argument constructor. Alternate Opentracing implementations will only trace JAX-RS, JAX-WS and classes or methods annotated with @Traced; Payara’s own request tracing service can trace more types of request. Payara’s request tracing service MUST also be enabled, whichever implementation is being used in order for tracing to occur. All other configuration within Payara’s request tracing service will have no effect on the supplied tracer, which must be configured separately to Payara.

Activating Request Tracing is done either via the admin console or using the commands:

set-requesttracing-configuration --enabled=true --dynamic=true bootstrap-requesttracing

As an example, see https://github.com/payara/ecosystem-jaeger-tracing, which shows how to integrate a Jaeger client tracer. This can be added as a library to Payara with the command add-library jaeger-tracer-lib-with-dependencies. Enabling request tracing in Payara Server is then required, which will then send traces from OpenTracing to a Jaeger collector on the same host.

MicroProfile 4.0 brings with it a number of changes to MicroProfile OpenTracing, among these changes are some which break previous behaviour. The breaking changes are primarily to do with the removal of a number of methods from the API, and only affect the use of OpenTracing programmatically (the use of the annotations has not changed).

The following methods have all been removed, and the alternative method to use provided if available: