README.md

brave-instrumentation-grpc

This contains tracing client and server interceptors for grpc.

The GrpcTracing class holds a reference to a tracing component, instructions on what to put into gRPC spans, and interceptors.

The client interceptor adds trace headers to outgoing requests. The server interceptor extracts trace state from incoming requests. Both report to Zipkin how long each request takes, along with relevant tags like the response status.

To enable tracing for a gRPC application, add the interceptors when constructing the client and server bindings:

grpcTracing = GrpcTracing.create(tracing);

Server server = ServerBuilder.forPort(serverPort)
    .addService(ServerInterceptors.intercept(
        GreeterGrpc.bindService(new GreeterImpl()), grpcTracing.newServerInterceptor()))
    .build()
    .start();

ManagedChannel channel = ManagedChannelBuilder.forAddress("localhost", serverPort)
    .intercept(grpcTracing.newClientInterceptor())
    .usePlaintext(true)
    .build();

Span data policy

By default, the following are added to both gRPC client and server spans:

• Span.name as the full method name: ex "helloworld.greeter/sayhello"
• Tags/binary annotations:
  • "grpc.status_code" when the status is not OK.
  • "error", when there is an exception or status is not OK.

Ex. To add a tag corresponding to a message sent to a server, you can do something like this:

grpcTracing = grpcTracing.toBuilder()
    .clientParser(new GrpcClientParser() {
      @Override protected <M> void onMessageSent(M message, SpanCustomizer span) {
        span.tag("grpc.message_sent", message.toString());
      }
    })
    .build();

If you just want to control span naming policy, override spanName in your client or server parser.

Ex:

overrideSpanName = new GrpcClientParser() {
  @Override protected <ReqT, RespT> String spanName(MethodDescriptor<ReqT, RespT> methodDescriptor) {
    return methodDescriptor.getType().name();
  }
};

gRPC Propagation Format (Census interop)

gRPC defines a binary encoded propagation format which is implemented by OpenCensus instrumentation. When this is the case, incoming requests will have two metadata keys "grpc-trace-bin" and "grpc-tags-bin".

When enabled, this component can extract trace contexts from these metadata and also write the same keys on outgoing calls. This allows transparent interop when both census and brave report data to the same tracing system.

To enable this feature, set grpcPropagationFormatEnabled which is off by default:

grpcTracing = GrpcTracing.newBuilder(tracing)
                         .grpcPropagationFormatEnabled(true).build();

Warning: the format of both "grpc-trace-bin" and "grpc-tags-bin" are version 0. As such, consider this feature experimental.

Development

If you are working on this module, then you need to run mvn install to first compile the protos. Once the protos are compiled, then can be found in the directories:

./target/generated-test-sources/protobuf/grpc-java ./target/generated-test-sources/protobuf/java

You may need to add the above directories as test sources in your IDE.