Zipkin 2.22 includes major improvements to the UI and Cassandra storage. It deprecates the v1 "cassandra" storage type, for the more modern "cassandra3" used for the last 2 years.
Before we dive into features, we'd like to thank folks who are less often thanked. People whose impacts aren't always spectacular new features, but without which nothing would really work well.
Features deliver while others need support. Our MVP @jorgheymans closed out over 60 issues since last release, while also doing a great amount of support on gitter. In cases change wasn't appropriate, you've noticed personal and thoughtful summaries. Jorg's work is a great example of community championship and we are grateful for his help.
Features also require attention. Code review makes contributors feel less alone and the resulting change better. @anuraaga has reviewed over 80 pull requests since our last minor release. Especially UI code can feel alone sometimes, and Rag's thoughtful feedback on code has clearly helped @tacigar deliver more of it.
Features need partnership. Zipkin's server, Elasticsearch and Stackdriver implementations are written in Armeria and @minwoox is our Armeria MVP. Min-Woo owned migration of Zipkin to Armeria 1.0 and again to 1.2, including glitches and experience improvements. Often these changes requires several rounds to polish and releases to coordinate. The only way this all worked was Min-Woo's ownership in both Armeria and our use of it.
Features need good advice. We'd finally like to thank @xeraa from Elasticsearch, @adutra and @olim7t from Datastax, and @jeqo from Confluent. We've updated quite a lot of code that required expert insight into how backends work, or our use of their drivers, and roadmap items. Jorge has been particularly applied in this, developing features in Kafka that would allow better storage implementation. All these folks are excellent stewards and gave heaps of advice to help keep us on the right path, which in turn keeps implementations relevant for you.
Let's now get on to some notable features in Zipkin 2.22
UI improvements
@tacigar led another great round of visible and invisible improvements to Zipkin's UI, Lens.
The first thing you will notice is a renovated sidebar and header design. Controls and links moved to the top of the display, revealing significantly more white space below. Brighter text and a while underline hints subtly which screen you are on, leaving your attention for the results below it:
The search controls are redesigned for effortless transitions between mouse and keyboard, or no mouse at all. Here's a search sequence using only the keyboard to execute a search.
Settings such as how far to look back and the time range have been tucked away neatly to reserve space. Don't worry though, all features are still around!
Those interested in underneath will appreciate the migration to TypeScript, redux and react-use, which reduced the code involved and increased the quality. There are more features in store, such as how to better render span counts. Please help Igarashi-san and the team by providing your feedback. It matters and makes UI development less lonely!
Cassandra
Over two years ago @michaelsembwever designed and @llinder co-implemented the "cassandra3" storage type. This writes data natively in Zipkin v2 format, reducing translation overhead and improving CQL experience. This requires a minimum version of Cassandra 3.11.3, released over two years ago. We deprecated the "cassandra" storage type, otherwise known as "Cassandra v1", for removal in Zipkin 2.23.
We hope you understand that limited resource means making hard decisions, and we don't take this lightly. However, we do feel two years is enough time to settle and please do contact us if you have concerns on gitter.
Meanwhile we've overhauled the code so that we can use the more modern Datastax Driver v4. This came with thanks to @adutra and @olim7t who gave months of advice during the process. The good news is this puts us in a good place to focus on new features as Cassandra 4 readies for prime time.
Docker
All Zipkin images now have HEALTHCHECK instructions, which can be used in Docker natively or in readiness probes. We switched from Distroless back to Alpine to reduce image heft further. Zipkin 2.22 images run on the very latest: JRE 15 patch 1. We overhauled our docker-compose examples as well added a new repository of Java based examples. If you'd like to perform similar for other languages, please volunteer on gitter!
Other news
There are too many changes to detail all the last six months, but here's a summary of impactful ones to end users:
- @ccharnkij added support for ES 7.8 composeable templates (with support by @xeraa!)
- @fredy-virguez-adl made the UI show multi-line tags
- @ronniekk corrected our docker health check
- @anuraaga added Dev Tools instructions for UI development.
- @jorgheymans added instructions on how to enable TLS on the server.
- @jorgheymans added docs on Elasticsearch data retention
- @jorgheymans and @jeqo added Kafka operational notes
- @uckyk completed the chinese translation of our UI
- @jeqo upgraded our Kafka drivers to latest version
- @hanahmily made
ES_CREDENTIALS_FILEwork on the slim distribution - @adriancole added
ES_SSL_NO_VERIFYfor test environments