Tracing your webservice/microservice helps in knowing the bottleneck of the component that is taking the most time to respond to. It also helps in pinpointing the location/log/function where the error occurs and what causes the poor performance.

In this blog post, we are trying to cover how we can leverage opentracing with Nginx while using Lighstep vendor for tracing our webapp.

OpenTracing Vendor-neutral APIs and instrumentation for distributed tracing.

Lightstep provides unlimited cardinality, dynamic service maps, and immediate (shockingly accurate) root cause correlation across traces, metrics, and logs anywhere in your system
Lightstep is just another vendor that provides connector for configuring distributed tracing based on opentracing standards.

We need to configure Nginx to use nginx-opentracing module and provide a vendor tracer , we are going to use LightStep vendor.

This GitGist should help you get started very easily.

Install.txt describes the steps to be followed for downloading and configuring the required lib.

Note these two lines –

load_module modules/ngx_http_opentracing_module.so;
Instructs Nginx to load the opentracing module

opentracing_load_tracer /usr/local/lib/liblightstep_tracer_plugin.so /etc/nginx/lightstep-config.json;
The config describes Lightstep vendor lib location and the vendor lib config

Note- In Step3 when you run the command
strings /lib64/libstdc++.so.6 | grep GLIBCXX
make sure you have available
GLIBCXX_3.4.25
GLIBCXX_3.4.26

Once you have configured all the above things you need to restart the Nginx and you should be able to see traces for all the requests your web app is serving.

This would look like