trace

Name

trace - enables OpenTracing-based tracing of DNS requests as they go through the plugin chain.

Description

With trace you enable OpenTracing of how a request flows through CoreDNS. Enable the debug plugin to get logs from the trace plugin.

Syntax

The simplest form is just:

trace [ENDPOINT-TYPE] [ENDPOINT]

• ENDPOINT-TYPE is the type of tracing destination. Currently only zipkin and datadog are supported. Defaults to zipkin.
• ENDPOINT is the tracing destination, and defaults to localhost:9411. For Zipkin, if ENDPOINT does not begin with http, then it will be transformed to http://ENDPOINT/api/v1/spans.

With this form, all queries will be traced.

Additional features can be enabled with this syntax:

trace [ENDPOINT-TYPE] [ENDPOINT] {
    every AMOUNT
    service NAME
    client_server
    datadog_analytics_rate RATE
    zipkin_max_backlog_size SIZE
    zipkin_max_batch_size SIZE
    zipkin_max_batch_interval DURATION
}

• every AMOUNT will only trace one query of each AMOUNT queries. For example, to trace 1 in every 100 queries, use AMOUNT of 100. The default is 1.
• service NAME allows you to specify the service name reported to the tracing server. Default is coredns.
• client_server will enable the ClientServerSameSpan OpenTracing feature.
• datadog_analytics_rate RATE will enable trace analytics on the traces sent from 0 to 1, 1 being every trace sent will be analyzed. This is a datadog only feature (ENDPOINT-TYPE needs to be datadog)
• zipkin_max_backlog_size configures the maximum backlog size for Zipkin HTTP reporter. When batch size reaches this threshold, spans from the beginning of the batch will be disposed. Default is 1000 backlog size.
• zipkin_max_batch_size configures the maximum batch size for Zipkin HTTP reporter, after which a collect will be triggered. The default batch size is 100 traces.
• zipkin_max_batch_interval configures the maximum duration we will buffer traces before emitting them to the collector using Zipkin HTTP reporter. The default batch interval is 1 second.

Zipkin

You can run Zipkin on a Docker host like this:

docker run -d -p 9411:9411 openzipkin/zipkin

Note the zipkin provider does not support the v1 API since coredns 1.7.1.

Examples

Use an alternative Zipkin address:

trace tracinghost:9253

or

. {
    trace zipkin tracinghost:9253
}

If for some reason you are using an API reverse proxy or something and need to remap the standard Zipkin URL you can do something like:

trace http://tracinghost:9411/zipkin/api/v1/spans

Using DataDog:

trace datadog localhost:8126

Trace one query every 10000 queries, rename the service, and enable same span:

trace tracinghost:9411 {
	every 10000
	service dnsproxy
	client_server
}

Metadata

The trace plugin will publish the following metadata, if the metadata plugin is also enabled:

• trace/traceid: identifier of (zipkin/datadog) trace of processed request

See Also

See the debug plugin for more information about debug logging.