Table of Contents
HBASE-6449 added support for tracing requests through HBase, using the open source tracing library, HTrace. Setting up tracing is quite simple, however it currently requires some very minor changes to your client code (it would not be very difficult to remove this requirement).
The tracing system works by collecting information in structs called ‘Spans’.
It is up to you to choose how you want to receive this information by implementing the
SpanReceiver interface, which defines one method:
public void receiveSpan(Span span);
This method serves as a callback whenever a span is completed. HTrace allows you to use as many SpanReceivers as you want so you can easily send trace information to multiple destinations.
Configure what SpanReceivers you’d like to use by putting a comma separated list of the
fully-qualified class name of classes implementing SpanReceiver in
hbase-site.xml property: hbase.trace.spanreceiver.classes.
HBase includes a HBaseLocalFileSpanReceiver that writes all span
information to local files in a JSON-based format. The HBaseLocalFileSpanReceiver
looks in hbase-site.xml for a hbase.trace.spanreceiver.localfilespanreceiver.filename
property with a value describing the name of the file to which nodes should write their span information.
If you do not want to use the included HBaseLocalFileSpanReceiver,
you are encouraged to write your own receiver (take a look at HBaseLocalFileSpanReceiver
for an example). If you think others would benefit from your receiver, file a JIRA or send a pull request to
HTrace.