The documentation you are viewing is for Dapr v1.11 which is an older version of Dapr. For up-to-date documentation, see the latest version.

Configure Dapr to send distributed tracing data

Set up Dapr to send distributed tracing data

Configuration

The tracing section under the Configuration spec contains the following properties:

spec:
  tracing:
    samplingRate: "1"
    otel: 
      endpointAddress: "https://..."
    zipkin:
      endpointAddress: "https://..."
    

The following table lists the properties for tracing:

Property Type Description
samplingRate string Set sampling rate for tracing to be enabled or disabled.
stdout bool True write more verbose information to the traces
otel.endpointAddress string Set the Open Telemetry (OTEL) server address.
otel.isSecure bool Is the connection to the endpoint address encrypted.
otel.protocol string Set to http or grpc protocol.
zipkin.endpointAddress string Set the Zipkin server address. If this is used, you do not need to specify the otel section.

To enable tracing, use a configuration file (in self hosted mode) or a Kubernetes configuration object (in Kubernetes mode). For example, the following configuration object changes the sample rate to 1 (every span is sampled), and sends trace using OTEL protocol to the OTEL server at localhost:4317

apiVersion: dapr.io/v1alpha1
kind: Configuration
metadata:
  name: tracing
spec:
  tracing:
    samplingRate: "1"
    otel:
      endpointAddress: "localhost:4317"
      isSecure: false
      protocol: grpc 

Sampling rate

Dapr uses probabilistic sampling. The sample rate defines the probability a tracing span will be sampled and can have a value between 0 and 1 (inclusive). The default sample rate is 0.0001 (i.e. 1 in 10,000 spans is sampled).

Changing samplingRate to 0 disables tracing altogether.

Environment variables

The OpenTelemetry (otel) endpoint can also be configured via an environment variables. The presence of the OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT environment variable turns on tracing for the sidecar.

Environment Variable Description
OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT Sets the Open Telemetry (OTEL) server address, turns on tracing
OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_INSECURE Sets the connection to the endpoint as unencrypted (true/false)
OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_PROTOCOL Transport protocol (grpc, http/protobuf, http/json)

Next steps

Learn how to set up tracing with one of the following tools:


Last modified September 27, 2023: Jaeger OpenTelemetry docs (#3727) (9af62701)