Distributed Tracing

Distributed tracing is a method of tracking application requests as they flow from frontend devices to backend services and databases. It is used to monitor and troubleshoot requests end-to-end.

Tyk currently supports OpenTracing for distributed tracing. Support for OpenTelemetry is on the near-term roadmap for the Tyk API Gateway. If this is a valuable feature for you, please leave a comment on this community forum post.

Supported observability tools

Jaeger
Zipkin
New Relic

Enabling distributed tracing

To enable distributed tracing, add the following tracing configuration to your Gateway tyk.conf file.

{
  "tracing": {
    "enabled": true,
    "name": "${tracer_name}",
    "options": {}
  }
}

name is the name of the supported tracer
enabled: set this to true to enable tracing
options: key/value pairs for configuring the enabled tracer. See the supported tracer documentation for more details.

Tyk will automatically propagate tracing headers to APIs when tracing is enabled.

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