zipkates

Zipkates: A Kubernetes Metadata Sidecar for Zipkin

Zipkates is a Kubernetes sidecar for Zipkin. It knows about the Pods in your cluster and uses their metadata to seamlessly add tags to spans.

Quickstart

Just change your existing Zipkin deployment as shown below and all spans sent from pods with an owner label will get an owner tag with the label's value.

+apiVersion: rbac.authorization.k8s.io/v1beta1
+kind: ClusterRole
+metadata:
+  name: zipkin
+rules:
+- apiGroups:
+  - ""
+  resources:
+  - pods
+  - namespaces
+  verbs:
+  - list
+  - watch
+---
+apiVersion: v1
+kind: ServiceAccount
+metadata:
+  name: zipkin
+  namespace: support
+---
+apiVersion: rbac.authorization.k8s.io/v1beta1
+kind: ClusterRoleBinding
+metadata:
+  name: zipkin
+roleRef:
+  apiGroup: rbac.authorization.k8s.io
+  kind: ClusterRole
+  name: zipkin
+subjects:
+- kind: ServiceAccount
+  name: zipkin
+  namespace: support
+---
 apiVersion: apps/v1
 kind: Deployment
 metadata:
@@ -24,16 +57,33 @@ spec:
         image: openzipkin/zipkin:2.21.1
         ports:
         - name: query-port
-          containerPort: 9411
+          containerPort: 9410
         env:
           - name: STORAGE_TYPE
             value: mem
           - name: QUERY_PORT
-            value: "9411"
+            value: "9410"
         readinessProbe:
           httpGet:
             path: /health
             port: query-port
+      - name: zipkates
+        image: salemove/zipkates:v0.1.0
+        ports:
+        - name: zipkates-port
+          containerPort: 9411
+        env:
+          - name: LABEL_TAG_MAPPING
+            value: '{"owner": "owner"}'
+          - name: LISTEN_PORT
+            value: '9411'
+          - name: ZIPKIN_PORT
+            value: '9410'
+        readinessProbe:
+          httpGet:
+            path: /healthz
+            port: zipkates-port
+      serviceAccount: zipkin

Configuration

The name

• Zipkin + Kubernetes
• Zipkin + k8s
• Zipkin + k-eight-s
• Zipkin + kates
• Zipkates ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Thank you

• @stevesoundcloud for inspiration in Using Kubernetes Pod Metadata to Improve Zipkin Traces and in private conversation.

Known limitations

Only v2 Zipkin API is supported. The v2 API was released in early 2018 and the v1 API has been deprecated since.

Possible improvements

• Account for X-Forwarded-For header for detecting the pod IP
• Only index pods that have the specified labels
• Allow configuring the namespace of pods to index (currently indexes all namespaces)
• Check the Content-Type header before trying to parse JSON
• Support TLS termination