Akka Tracing 0.5 released

0.5

New features:

• Akka HTTP support
• Spray client support
• automatic tracing context propagation for messages serialized by Akka facilities
• support for custom context propagation via tracing metadata API calls
• trace.flush call forcing the extension to submit a span
• trace.sampleClient call to initiate traces from client side

Improvements:

• greatly improved test coverage
• better interoperability with Brave
• span processing pipeline implementation now uses akka-stream underneath
• backpressure implementation for thrift transport
• black lists for automatically tracked HTTP headers
• mutable fields were removed from TracingSupport
• spray integration: reject requests with broken tracing headers

API changes:

• trace.forcedSample was deprecated, use trace.sample(force = true) instead
• child.asChildOf(parent) was deprecated, use trace.createChild(parent, child) instead
• trace.finish was deprecated, use trace.record(ts, TracingAnnotations.ServerSend) instead

What is it?

A distributed tracing Akka extension based on Twitter's Zipkin, which can be used as performance diagnostics and debugging tool.

It allows you to:

• trace call hierarchies inside an actor system;
• debug request processing pipelines (you can log to traces, annotate them with custom key-value pairs);
• see dependencies between derived requests and their contribution to resulting response time;
• find and analyse slowest requests in your system.