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levkhomich edited this page Dec 25, 2014 · 10 revisions

What is it?

A distributed tracing Akka extension based on Twitter's Zipkin, which can be used as performance diagnostics and debugging tool.

It allows you to:

  • trace call hierarchies inside an actor system;
  • debug request processing pipelines (you can log to traces, annotate them with custom key-value pairs);
  • see dependencies between derived requests and their contribution to resulting response time;
  • find and analyse slowest requests in your system.

Distributed tracing approach used by Zipkin synergise with akka-remote and akka-cluster. Extension provides integration with Play framework and Spray toolkit.

It is better to see once: trace example

Getting started

Project's activator templates are the good starting points:

  • Akka Tracing - shows general features, Java API and Spray integration;
  • Play Tracing - demonstrates Play framework integration.