How to Set Up Distributed Tracing with Spring Cloud, Nacos, and Zipkin

Environment

spring cloud Hoxton.SR11 + spring cloud alibaba 2.2.5.RELEASE + zipkin 2.23.2 + nacos 1.4.1 + Elasticsearch 7.8.0 + Kibana 7.8.0

service‑producer module

<dependencies>
  <dependency>
    <groupId>com.alibaba.cloud</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-cloud-starter-alibaba-nacos-discovery</artifactId>
  </dependency>
  <dependency>
    <groupId>org.springframework.cloud</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-cloud-starter-zipkin</artifactId>
  </dependency>
</dependencies>

server:
  port: 9100
---
spring:
  cloud:
    nacos:
      username: dev
      password: 123456
      discovery:
        enabled: true
        serverAddr: localhost:8848
        namespace: 7205e69c-ac51-4ac1-bbe9-87c28689b88b
---
spring:
  application:
    name: service-producer
---
# Zipkin service address
spring:
  zipkin:
    base-url: http://127.0.0.1:9411
  sleuth:
    sampler:
      probability: 1.0

API

@RestController
@RequestMapping("discovery")
public class DiscoveryController {

  @NacosInjected
  private NamingService namingService;
  @Resource
  private DiscoveryClient discoverClient;

  @GetMapping(value = "/get")
  public Object get(@RequestParam String serviceName) throws Exception {
    Map<String, Object> res = new HashMap<>();
    res.put("services", discoverClient.getServices());
    res.put("instances", discoverClient.getInstances(serviceName));
    res.put("port", 9000);
    return res;
  }
}

service‑consumer module

Dependencies and configuration are the same as service‑producer.

Configure RestTemplate

@LoadBalanced
@Bean
public RestTemplate restTemplate() {
  return new RestTemplate();
}

API

@RestController
@RequestMapping("/consumer")
public class ConsumerController {

  @Resource
  private RestTemplate restTemplate;

  @GetMapping("/get")
  public Object invoke(String serviceName) {
    return restTemplate.getForObject(
      "http://service-producer/discovery/get?serviceName=" + serviceName,
      Object.class);
  }
}

service‑gateway (Zuul) module

<dependencies>
  <dependency>
    <groupId>org.springframework.cloud</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-cloud-starter-netflix-zuul</artifactId>
  </dependency>
  <dependency>
    <groupId>com.alibaba.cloud</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-cloud-starter-alibaba-nacos-discovery</artifactId>
  </dependency>
  <dependency>
    <groupId>com.alibaba.cloud</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-cloud-starter-alibaba-nacos-config</artifactId>
  </dependency>
  <dependency>
    <groupId>org.springframework.cloud</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-cloud-starter-zipkin</artifactId>
  </dependency>
</dependencies>

server:
  port: 10001
---
ribbon:
  ReadTimeout: 5000
  ConnectTimeout: 5000
  OkToRetryOnAllOperations: false
  MaxAutoRetries: 1
  MaxAutoRetriesNextServer: 1
---
zuul:
  ignoredServices: '*'
  prefix: /api
  stripPrefix: true
  routes:
    service-producer:
      path: /api-a/**
      serviceId: service-consumer
      customSensitiveHeaders: true
      sensitiveHeaders:
  addHostHeader: true
  host:
    connectTimeoutMillis: 20000
    socketTimeoutMillis: 20000
  ignoreLocalService: true
---
spring:
  zipkin:
    base-url: http://127.0.0.1:9411
  sleuth:
    sampler:
      probability: 1.0
---
spring:
  application:
    name: service-gateway
---
spring:
  cloud:
    nacos:
      username: dev
      password: 123456
      discovery:
        enabled: true
        serverAddr: localhost:8848
        namespace: 7205e69c-ac51-4ac1-bbe9-87c28689b88b

Zipkin service

For Spring Boot 2.x and later you can run Zipkin without building your own server; download and start it as follows:

java -jar zipkin.jar --STORAGE_TYPE=elasticsearch --ES_HOSTS=localhost:9200

After restarting the three services, access the API endpoints and view the trace data in Zipkin UI and Kibana.

Persisting trace logs

By default Zipkin stores traces in memory; to persist them you can use memory, MySQL, Cassandra, or Elasticsearch. This guide uses Elasticsearch for its simplicity.

Run Zipkin with Elasticsearch storage:

java -jar zipkin.jar --STORAGE_TYPE=elasticsearch --ES_HOSTS=localhost:9200

After restarting the services and invoking the APIs, Kibana will automatically create an index and display the trace logs.

At this point, distributed tracing for the microservice system is fully configured.