brave-context-jfr

This adds trace and span IDs to JDK Flight Recorder "Scope" events so that you can correlate with Zipkin UI or logs accordingly.

Applications that use this must be running JRE 11 and enable flight recording (ex -XX:StartFlightRecording).

To view the flight recordings, you need JDK Mission Control 7.

With the above in place, you can configure brave.Tracing with JfrScopeDecorator like so:

tracing = Tracing.newBuilder()
    .currentTraceContext(ThreadLocalCurrentTraceContext.newBuilder()
       .addScopeDecorator(JfrScopeDecorator.get())
       .build()
    )
    ...
    .build();

Once a flight is recorded, look for "Zipkin/Scope" in the Event browser:

You can then copy/paste the trace ID into the zipkin UI, or use log correlation to further debug a problem.

Credits

This work was inspired by https://github.com/opentracing-contrib/java-jfr-tracer by @thegreystone, who also helped review this implementation. This implementation takes advantage of Brave's scope decorator design, which led to it being comparatively small (<50 lines of code including imports). Other factors that allow this to be small are constraints such as no attempts to work pre Java 11, and no attempts to copy span data to JFR besides trace identifiers. Finally, this uses namespace "Zipkin/Scope" to avoid clash with others.