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Viewing Stackdriver Trace spans and request logs in multi-project deployments
Friday, April 6, 2018
By Morgan McLean, Product Manager, John Bryan, Software Engineer, and Dave Raffensberger, Software Engineer
Google Cloud Platform
(GCP) provides developers and operators with fine-grained billing and resource access management for separate applications through projects. But while isolating application services across projects is important for security and cost allocation, it can make debugging cross-service issues more difficult.
Stackdriver Trace
, our tool for analyzing latency data from your applications, can now visualize traces and logs for requests that cross multiple projects, all in a single waterfall chart. This lets you see how requests propagate through services in separate projects and helps to identify sources of poor performance across your entire stack.
To view spans and log entries for cross-project traces, follow the instructions in the
Viewing traces across projects documentation
. Your projects will need to be part of a single organization, as explained in
Best Practices for Enterprise Organizations
. To do so,
create an organization
and then
migrate existing projects
to it.
Once your projects are in an organization, you’re ready to view multi-project traces. First, select any one of the relevant projects in the GCP Console, and then navigate to the Trace List page and select a trace. You will see spans for all the projects in your organization for which you have “cloudtrace.traces.get” permission. The “Project” label in the span details panel on the right indicates which project the selected span is from.
You can also view log entries associated with the request from all projects that were part of the trace. This requires the “logging.logEntries.list” permission on the associated projects and it requires you to set the LogEntry “trace” field using the format “projects/[PROJECT-ID]/traces/[TRACE-ID]” when you write your logs to
Stackdriver Logging
. You may also set the LogEntry “span_id” field as the 16-character hexadecimal encoded span ID to associate logs with specific trace spans.
See Viewing Trace Details > Log Entries
for details.
If you use
Google Kubernetes Engine
or the
Stackdriver Logging Agent
via Fluentd, you can set the LogEntry “trace” and “span_id” fields by writing structured logs with the keys of “logging.googleapis.com/trace” and “logging.googleapis.com/span_id”. See
Special fields in structured payloads
for more information.
To view the associated log entries inline with trace spans, click “Show Logs.”
Automatic association of traces and logs
Here are the GCP languages and environments that support automatically associating traces and log entries:
Node.js
: if you use the
Stackdriver Trace Node.js SDK
, and you write your logs using Winston or Bunyan, you can use the
@google-cloud/logging-bunyan
or
@google-cloud/logging-winston
packages, which will automatically annotate your log entries with the “trace” field when the request is sampled for trace and a trace context is available.
Ruby
: use the
google-cloud-trace
and the
google-cloud-logging
gems to automatically assign the “trace” field of log entries.
Java Spring
: the
Spring Boot Starter for Stackdriver Trace
can collect trace spans and the
Spring Cloud GCP Stackdriver Logging Support
can automatically tag log entries with trace and span IDs.
Both the
App Engine Standard environment
and
App Engine Flexible
default containers for Ruby, PHP, Java and Node.js automatically associate traces and logs.
The
GCP HTTP(S) load balancers
also write trace and span IDs in log entries.
Now, having applications in multiple projects is no longer a barrier to identifying the sources of poor performance in your stack. Click
here
to learn more about Stackdriver Trace.
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