Important: This documentation is about an older version. It's relevant only to the release noted, many of the features and functions have been updated or replaced. Please view the current version.

Documentation

Grafana documentation

Features

Data Sources

Using Zipkin in Grafana

Enterprise Open source

Zipkin data source

Grafana ships with built-in support for Zipkin, an open source, distributed tracing system. Just add it as a data source and you are ready to query your traces in Explore.

Adding the data source

To access Zipkin settings, click the Configuration (gear) icon, then click Data Sources, and then click Zipkin.

Name	Description
Name	The data source name. This is how you refer to the data source in panels, queries, and Explore.
Default	Default data source means that it will be pre-selected for new panels.
URL	The URL of the Zipkin instance, e.g., `http://localhost:9411`
Access	Server (default) = URL needs to be accessible from the Grafana backend/server, Browser = URL needs to be accessible from the browser.
Basic Auth	Enable basic authentication to the Zipkin data source.
User	User name for basic authentication.
Password	Password for basic authentication.

Query traces

Querying and displaying traces from Zipkin is available via Explore.

The Zipkin query editor allows you to query by trace ID directly or selecting a trace from trace selector. To query by trace ID, insert the ID into the text input.

Screenshot of the Zipkin query editor with trace selector expanded

Use the trace selector to pick particular trace from all traces logged in the time range you have selected in Explore. The trace selector has three levels of nesting:

The service you are interested in.
Particular operation is part of the selected service
Specific trace in which the selected operation occurred, represented by the root operation name and trace duration.