View the documentation
Spandex is a library for tracing your elixir application. Tracing is a monitoring tool that allows you get extremely granular information about the runtime of your system. Using distributed tracing, you can also get a view of how requests make their way through your entire ecosystem of microservices or applications. Currently, Spandex only supports integrating with datadog, but it is built to be agnostic to what platform you choose to view your trace data. Eventually it should support open zipkin, Stackdriver, and any other trace viewer/aggregation tool you'd like to integrate with. We are still under active development, working on moving to a more standard/generic implementation of the internals. Contributions welcome!
The 3.0 release only involves ensuring that you're using the latest adapter, which will be explicit in its dependency on a spandex version. This major version was done only to solve for breaking changes between the adapter and spandex core, in order to honor semver and also not break everyone's installation.
This is Datadog-specific since that's currently the only adapter.
- Include the adapter as a dependency (see below).
- Replace any occurrences of
Spandex.Adapters.Datadog
withSpandexDatadog.Adapter
in your code. - Replace any occurences of
Spandex.Adapters.ApiSender
withSpandexDatadog.ApiSender
in your code.
- Datadog
- Thats it so far! If you want another adapter, it should be relatively easy to write! This library is in charge of handling the state management of spans, and the adapter is just in charge of generating certain values and ultimately sending the values to the service.
def deps do
[{:spandex, "~> 3.0.2"}]
end
Define your tracer:
defmodule MyApp.Tracer do
use Spandex.Tracer, otp_app: :my_app
end
Configure it:
config :my_app, MyApp.Tracer,
service: :my_api,
adapter: SpandexDatadog.Adapter,
disabled?: false,
env: "PROD"
Or at runtime, by calling configure/1
(usually in your application's startup)
MyApp.Tracer.configure(disabled?: System.get_env("TRACE") != "true")
For more information on Tracer configuration, view the docs for
Spandex.Tracer
. There you will find the documentation for the opts
schema.
The entire configuration can also be passed into each function in your tracer
to be overridden if desired. For example:
MyApp.Tracer.start_span("span_name", service: :some_special_service)
Your configuration and the configuration in your config files are merged together, to avoid needing to specify this config at all times.
To bypass the Tracer pattern entirely, you can call directly into the functions
in Spandex
, like Spandex.start_span("span_name", [adapter: Foo, service: :bar])
. Note that in this case, you will need to specify all of the
configuration options in each call, because the Tracer is not managing the
defaults for you.
For adapter configuration, see the documentation for that adapter
There are 3 plugs provided for usage w/ Phoenix:
Spandex.Plug.StartTrace
- See moduledocs for options. Goes as early in your pipeline as possible.Spandex.Plug.AddContext
- See moduledocs for options. Either after the router, or inside a pipeline in the router.Spandex.Plug.EndTrace
- Must go after your router.
Individual adapters can support distributed tracing. See their documentation for more information.
In general, you'll probably want the current span_id and trace_id in your logs,
so that you can find them in your tracing service. Make sure to add span_id
and trace_id
to logger_metadata
config :logger, :console,
metadata: [:request_id, :trace_id, :span_id]
The nicest interface for working with spans is the span
macro, illustrated in
span_me_also
below.
defmodule ManuallyTraced do
require Spandex
# Does not handle exceptions for you.
def trace_me() do
Tracer.start_trace("my_trace") #also opens a span
Tracer.update_span(service: :my_app, type: :db)
result = span_me()
Tracer.finish_trace()
result
end
# Does not handle exceptions for you.
def span_me() do
Tracer.start_span("this_span")
Tracer.update_span(service: :my_app, type: :web)
result = span_me_also()
Tracer.finish_span()
end
# Handles exception at the span level. Trace still must be reported.
def span_me_also() do
Tracer.span("span_me_also") do
...
end
end
end
See the module documentation for Spandex.Span
as well as the documentation
for the structs contained as keys for that struct. They illustrate the keys
that are known to either be common keys or to have UI sugar with certain
clients. Its hard to find any kind of list of these published anywhere, so let
me know if you know of more!
For example:
Spandex.update_span(
type: :db,
http: [url: "/posts", status_code: 400],
sql_query: [query: "SELECT * FROM posts", rows: 10]
)
The current trace_id
and span_id
can be retrieved and later used (for
example, from another process) as follows:
trace_id = Tracer.current_trace_id()
span_id = Tracer.current_span_id()
span_context = %SpanContext{trace_id: trace_id, parent_id: span_id}
Tracer.continue_trace("new_trace", span_context)
New spans can then be logged from there and sent in a separate batch.
There is (currently and temporarily) only one storage strategy, which can be
changed via the strategy
option. See Tracer opt documentation for an example
of setting it. To implement your own (ETS adapter should be on its way), simply
implement the Spandex.Strategy
behaviour. Keep in mind that the strategy is
not an atomic pattern. It represents retrieving and wholesale replacing a
trace, meaning that it is not safe to use across processes or concurrently.
Each process should have its own store for its own generated spans. This should
be fine because you can send multiple batches of spans for the same trace
separately.
Because the decorator
library can cause conflicts when it interacts with other dependencies in the same project, we support it as an optional dependency. This allows you to disable it if it causes problems for you, but it also means that you need to explicitly include some version of decorator
in your application's dependency list:
# mix.exs
defp deps do
[
{:decorator, "~> 1.2"}
]
end
Then, configure the Spandex decorator with your default tracer:
config :spandex, :decorators, tracer: MyApp.Tracer
Span function decorators take an optional argument which is the attributes to update the span with. One of those attributes can be the :tracer
in case you want to override the default tracer (e.g., in case you want to use multiple tracers).
IMPORTANT If you define multiple clauses for a function, you'll have to decorate all of the ones you want to span.
defmodule TracedModule do
use Spandex.Decorators
@decorate trace(service: :my_app, type: :web)
def trace_me() do
span_1()
end
@decorate span(name: "span_1")
def span_1() do
inner_span_1()
end
@decorate span()
def inner_span_1() do
_ = ThirdPartyApi.different_service_call()
inner_span_2()
end
@decorate span(tracer: MyApp.OtherTracer)
def inner_span_2() do
"this produces a span stack to be reported by another tracer"
end
# Multiple Clauses
@decorate span()
def divide(n, 0), do: {:error, :divide_by_zero}
@decorate span()
def divide(n, m), do: n / m
end
defmodule ThirdPartyApi do
use Spandex.Decorators
@decorate span(service: :third_party, type: :cache)
def different_service_call() do
...
end
end
Note: Decorators don't magically do everything. It often makes a lot of sense to use Tracer.update_span
from within your function to add details that are only available inside that same function.
Check out spandex_ecto.
Check out spandex_phoenix.