MeshTrace

This policy uses new policy matching algorithm. Do not combine with TrafficTrace.

This policy enables publishing traces to a third party tracing solution.

Tracing is supported over HTTP, HTTP2, and gRPC protocols. You must explicitly specify the protocol for each service and data plane proxy you want to enable tracing for.

Kong Mesh currently supports the following trace exposition formats:

• Zipkin traces in this format can be sent to many different tracing backends
• Datadog

Services still need to be instrumented to preserve the trace chain across requests made across different services.

You can instrument with a language library of your choice (for Zipkin and for Datadog). For HTTP you can also manually forward the following headers:

• x-request-id
• x-b3-traceid
• x-b3-parentspanid
• x-b3-spanid
• x-b3-sampled
• x-b3-flags

To learn more about the information in this table, see the matching docs.

Sampling

Most of the time setting only overall is sufficient. random and client are for advanced use cases.

You can configure sampling settings equivalent to Envoy’s:

• overall
• random
• client

The value is always a percentage and is between 0 and 100.

Example:

sampling:
  overall: 80
  random: 60
  client: 40

Tags

You can add tags to trace metadata by directly supplying the value (literal) or by taking it from a header (header).

Example:

tags:
  - name: team
    literal: core
  - name: env
    header:
      name: x-env
      default: prod
  - name: version
    header:
      name: x-version

If a value is missing for header, default is used. If default isn’t provided, then the tag won’t be added.

Backends

Datadog

You can configure a Datadog backend with a url and splitService.

Example:

datadog:
  url: http://my-agent:8080 # Required. The url to reach a running datadog agent
  splitService: true # Default to false. If true, it will split inbound and outbound requests in different services in Datadog

The splitService property determines if Datadog service names should be split based on traffic direction and destination. For example, with splitService: true and a backend service that communicates with a couple of databases, you would get service names like backend_INBOUND, backend_OUTBOUND_db1, and backend_OUTBOUND_db2 in Datadog.

Zipkin

In most cases the only field you’ll want to set is url.

Example:

zipkin:
  url: http://jaeger-collector:9411/api/v2/spans # Required. The url to a zipkin collector to send traces to 
  traceId128bit: false # Default to false which will expose a 64bits traceId. If true, the id of the trace is 128bits
  apiVersion: httpJson # Default to httpJson. It can be httpJson, httpProto and is the version of the zipkin API
  sharedSpanContext: false # Default to true. If true, the inbound and outbound traffic will share the same span. 

OpenTelemetry

The only field you can set is endpoint.

Example:

openTelemetry:
  endpoint: otel-collector:4317 # Required. Address of OpenTelemetry collector