Design Trace and Tag Propagation for Kafka

[dinooliva]

In previous work, we have defined Trace and Tag propagation for Google Pub/Sub - we would like a similar mechanism for Kafka.

Zipkin implements such support based on Kafka message headers - for details, see:

• https://zipkin.io/zipkin-api/ (model -> span -> kind)
• https://github.com/openzipkin/brave/blob/master/instrumentation/kafka-clients/README.md (kafka > v0.11.0)
• https://zipkin.io/pages/instrumenting.html (see Message Tracing)

[SergeyKanzhelev]

It looks like Kafka header values are binary arrays. So consider trying w3c/trace-context#215 for traceparent. There is a proposal to use this binary protocol for AMQP: w3c/trace-context#217

I'd be happy to work on binary protocol for Tags to put it into https://github.com/w3c/correlation-context specification.