Tracers

A tracer type represents a destination for Benthos to send tracing events to, such as Jaeger.

When a tracer is configured, all messages will be allocated a root span during ingestion that represents their journey through a Benthos pipeline. Many Benthos processors create spans, and so tracing is a great way to analyze the pathways of individual messages as they progress through a Benthos instance.

Some inputs, such as http_server and http_client, are capable of extracting a root span from the source of the message (HTTP headers). This is a work in progress and should eventually expand so that all inputs have a way of doing so.

Other inputs, such as kafka can be configured to extract a root span by using the extract_tracing_map field.

A tracer config section looks like this:

tracer:
  jaeger:
    agent_address: localhost:6831
    sampler_type: const
    sampler_param: 1

WARNING: Although the configuration spec of this component is stable the format of spans, tags, and logs created by Benthos is subject to change as it is tuned for improvement.

Name	Tags
gcp_cloudtrace	GCP
jaeger	Jaeger
none	None
open_telemetry_collector	Open Telemetry Collector