A minimalistic .NET client library for Twitter Zipkin tracing.

It provides a handy set of Zipkin primitives such as spans, annotations, binary annotations to Zipkin receiver through chosen protocol (HTTP or Kafka), using Thrift encoding for efficiency.

It does NOT keep any kind of logical trace context for you. This way it avoids any dependencies on things like HttpContext or building complex abstractions. It also does NOT try to introduce any retry or failure handling policies. All of this + extremely small API makes it a great choice as low level library to be used by custom higher level plugins.

var collector = new HttpCollector(new Uri("http://localhost:9411/"));

// create a span
var trace = new TraceHeader(traceId: (ulong)random.Next(), spanId: (ulong)random.Next());
var span = new Span(trace, new IPEndPoint(serviceIp, servicePort), "test-service");

span.Record(Annotations.ServerReceive(DateTime.UtcNow));
// ... handle a RPC request
span.Record(Annotations.ServerSend(DateTime.UtcNow));

// send data to to zipkin
await collector.CollectAsync(span);

An interface used to communicate with one of the Zipkin span receivers.

• Task CollectAsync(params Span[] spans) - Asynchronously sends a series of spans. May throw ZipkinCollectorException when spans delivery failed.

Span collector has following implementations:

• HttpCollector - A collector sending all data to zipkin endpoint using HTTP protocol. Spans are encoded using Thrift encoding.
• DebugCollector - Debug collector used for printing spans into provided output.
• KafkaCollector (Zipkin.Tracer.Kafka library) - A collector sending all data to zipkin through kafka producer.

A set of annotations and binary annotations that corresponds to a particular RPC.

• TraceHeader TraceHeader - Trace header containing are identifiers necessary to locate current span.
• string ServiceName - Name of the service displayed by Zipkin UI.
• ICollection<Annotation> Annotations - Collection of annotations recorder withing current span time frame.
• ICollection<BinaryAnnotation> BinaryAnnotations - Collection of binary annotations used to attach additional metadata with the span itself.
• IPEndPoint Endpoint - Endpoint, target span's service is listening on.
• void Record(Annotation annotation) - Records an annotation within current span. Also sets it's endpoint if it was not set previously.
• void Record(BinaryAnnotation binaryAnnotation) - Records a binary annotation within current span. Also sets it's endpoint if it was not set previously.

A structure containing all of the data necessary to identify span and it's trace among others.

• ulong TraceId - The overall ID of the trace. Every span in a trace will share this ID.
• ulong SpanId - The ID for a particular span. This may or may not be the same as the trace id.
• ulong? ParentId - This is an optional ID that will only be present on child spans. That is the span without a parent id is considered the root of the trace.
• bool IsDebug - Marks current span with debug flag.
• TraceHeader Child(ulong childId) - Creates a trace header for the new span being a child of the span identified by current trace header.

An Annotation is used to record an occurance in time.

• DateTime Timestamp - Timestamp marking the occurrence of an event.
• string Value - Value holding an information about the annotation.
• IPEndPoint Endpoint - Service endpoint.

Special annotation without time component. They can carry extra information i.e. when calling an HTTP service ⇒ URI of the call.

• string Key - Key identifier of binnary annotation.
• byte[] Value - Binary annotation's value as binary.
• AnnotationType AnnotationType - Enum identifying type of value stored inside Value field.
• IPEndPoint Endpoint - Service endpoint.

Static class containing set of constructors for some of the annotations (also binary annotations) recognized by Zipkin itself i.e: ServerSend, ClientSend, ServerReceive or ClientReceive.

Static class with set of values, that could be used as Annotation values of BinaryAnnotation keys.