Custom headers in tracing span tags

Policies and Telemetry
1

Hi, Istio Community!

Now I am playing with Istio (1.0.5) distributed tracing and have working default configuration – Envoy generates trace spans and sends it to Jaeger collector.

Services communicates over gRPC and messages contains custom headers. I want to get some of this headers in Jaeger as span tags. Is it possible to configure span tag list generated by Envoy?

If not, how can I switch to mixer-generated spans? And how to configure mixer-generated spans tags for default Jaeger-collector?

Thanks!

2

There is no way in Istio to customize Envoy-generated spans at the moment.

Switching to mixer-generated spans is a matter of installing config for tracespan instances, a handler, and a rule to route instances to the handler. Support for sending spans to Zipkin API compatible backends was added in the 1.1 timeframe (https://github.com/istio/istio/pull/11282). The integration tests for that PR demonstrate setting up custom tags.

3

Thanks for your advice, Douglas.
I’ll try this with version 1.1.