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Spring Boot 4 Microservices & REST APIs · Lesson

Distributed Tracing with Zipkin

Integrate Zipkin for end-to-end distributed tracing across microservices to debug complex interactions.

Distributed Tracing with Zipkin is a free Spring Boot 4 Microservices & REST APIs lesson on CoddyKit — lesson 3 of 3. You can read the complete lesson below for free — then practise it hands-on in the browser with a built-in code editor and a 24/7 AI tutor. It is part of the Spring Boot 4 Microservices & REST APIs learning path, one of 3 lessons in the course, and your progress syncs across the web and the CoddyKit app.

The Microservice Debugging Maze

In a microservices architecture, a single user request might travel through many different services. When something goes wrong, it's like finding a needle in a haystack!

Traditional logging only shows what happened within one service. We need a way to see the entire journey.

What is Distributed Tracing?

Distributed tracing is a technique to monitor and observe requests as they flow through different components of a distributed system.

  • It helps you understand how services interact.
  • It pinpoints performance bottlenecks.
  • It makes debugging across service boundaries much easier.

Introducing Zipkin

Zipkin is an open-source distributed tracing system.

It helps you gather timing data needed to troubleshoot latency problems in microservice architectures. It manages both the collection and lookup of this data.

Core Concepts: Trace & Span

Two fundamental concepts in distributed tracing are Traces and Spans:

  • A Trace represents a single request or workflow as it flows through your entire system.
  • A Span is a single operation within a trace. It has a name, a unique ID, and a parent ID (unless it's the root span).

Think of a Trace as a story, and Spans as the individual chapters.

How Zipkin Works

Zipkin works by collecting data from your instrumented services.

Here's the basic flow:

  1. Your services send tracing data (spans) to the Zipkin Collector.
  2. The Collector stores this data (e.g., in memory, MySQL, Elasticsearch).
  3. You use the Zipkin UI to visualize and analyze the traces.

Spring Cloud Sleuth Magic

For Spring Boot applications, Spring Cloud Sleuth makes integration with Zipkin incredibly easy.

Sleuth automatically adds tracing information to your logs and HTTP headers, and sends it to Zipkin without much manual coding from you.

Setting Up Zipkin Locally

The easiest way to run a Zipkin server locally is using Docker. If you have Docker installed, just run this command in your terminal:

docker run -p 9411:9411 openzipkin/zipkin

Once running, you can access the Zipkin UI at http://localhost:9411.

Simple Service Instrumentation

To enable tracing, add Sleuth and Zipkin dependencies (spring-cloud-starter-sleuth and spring-cloud-sleuth-zipkin). Then, configure your application.properties to point to the Zipkin server:

spring.application.name=my-traced-service
spring.zipkin.base-url=http://localhost:9411
spring.sleuth.sampler.probability=1.0 (trace all requests)

Now, let's look at a simple service that sends traces!

Tracing an Endpoint Call

Here's a basic Spring Boot service. With the properties from the last scene and Sleuth dependencies, it will automatically send trace data to Zipkin when you hit its /hello endpoint.

Try running this and then visiting http://localhost:8080/hello. Check your Zipkin UI!

import org.springframework.boot.SpringApplication;
import org.springframework.boot.autoconfigure.SpringBootApplication;
import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.GetMapping;
import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.RestController;

@SpringBootApplication
@RestController
public class MyTracedServiceApplication {

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        SpringApplication.run(MyTracedServiceApplication.class, args);
    }

    @GetMapping("/hello")
    public String hello() {
        // Sleuth automatically adds tracing to this request
        System.out.println("Processing /hello request...");
        return "Hello from Traced Service!";
    }
}

Exploring the Zipkin UI

After making requests to your traced service, open http://localhost:9411 in your browser.

You can search for traces by service name or trace ID. The UI will show you a visual timeline of each trace, including its spans, duration, and dependencies between services.

Quick Check: Tracing Terms

Test your understanding of distributed tracing with Zipkin.

Recap: Debugging with Zipkin

Great job! You've learned how distributed tracing helps debug microservices, and how Zipkin and Spring Cloud Sleuth make it easy.

  • Distributed tracing visualizes request flow.
  • Zipkin collects and displays trace data.
  • Sleuth automates instrumentation for Spring Boot.

This helps you quickly find issues and optimize performance across your services.

Frequently asked questions

Is the “Distributed Tracing with Zipkin” lesson free?

Yes — the full text of “Distributed Tracing with Zipkin” is free to read here on the web, and the Spring Boot 4 Microservices & REST APIs course includes 3 lessons in total. To practise it interactively (a built-in code editor and a 24/7 AI tutor) and unlock the rest of the Spring Boot 4 Microservices & REST APIs course, upgrade to CoddyKit PRO.

What will I learn in “Distributed Tracing with Zipkin”?

Integrate Zipkin for end-to-end distributed tracing across microservices to debug complex interactions. You practise Spring Boot 4 Microservices & REST APIs with hands-on code you run directly in the browser, and a 24/7 AI tutor answers your questions as you work through the lesson.

Do I need any experience to start Spring Boot 4 Microservices & REST APIs?

No prior experience is required. Spring Boot 4 Microservices & REST APIs on CoddyKit is structured for beginners through advanced learners; this is — lesson 3 of 3, so you can start here or from the beginning and move at your own pace.

How long does the “Distributed Tracing with Zipkin” lesson take?

Most CoddyKit lessons take about 5–10 minutes. Each one is bite-sized and interactive, so you make steady progress and pick up exactly where you left off across the web and the app.

Can I write and run code in this Spring Boot 4 Microservices & REST APIs lesson?

Yes. Every Spring Boot 4 Microservices & REST APIs lesson includes a built-in code editor, so you write and run real code right in your browser and get instant AI feedback — no local setup required.

All lessons in this course

  1. Circuit Breakers with Resilience4j
  2. Implementing Fallbacks and Timeouts
  3. Distributed Tracing with Zipkin
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