11. Span Data as Messages
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11. Span Data as Messages

	Important
	The suggested approach is to use the Zipkin’s native support for message based span sending. Starting from Edgware Zipkin Stream server is deprecated and in Finchley it got removed.

You can accumulate and send span data over Spring Cloud Stream by including the spring-cloud-sleuth-stream jar as a dependency, and adding a Channel Binder implementation (e.g. spring-cloud-starter-stream-rabbit for RabbitMQ or spring-cloud-starter-stream-kafka for Kafka). This will automatically turn your app into a producer of messages with payload type Spans. The channel name to which the spans will be sent is called sleuth.

11.1 Zipkin Consumer

Please refer to the Dalston Documentaion on how to create a Stream Zipkin server. That approach has been deprecated in Edgware and removed in Finchley release.

11.2 Custom Consumer

A custom consumer can also easily be implemented using spring-cloud-sleuth-stream and binding to the SleuthSink. Example:

@EnableBinding(SleuthSink.class)
@SpringBootApplication(exclude = SleuthStreamAutoConfiguration.class)
@MessageEndpoint
public class Consumer {

    @ServiceActivator(inputChannel = SleuthSink.INPUT)
    public void sink(Spans input) throws Exception {
        // ... process spans
    }
}

	Note
	the sample consumer application above explicitly excludes `SleuthStreamAutoConfiguration` so it doesn’t send messages to itself, but this is optional (you might actually want to trace requests into the consumer app).

In order to customize the polling mechanism you can create a bean of PollerMetadata type with name equal to StreamSpanReporter.POLLER. Here you can find an example of such a configuration.

@Configuration
public static class CustomPollerConfiguration {

	@Bean(name = StreamSpanReporter.POLLER)
	PollerMetadata customPoller() {
		PollerMetadata poller = new PollerMetadata();
		poller.setMaxMessagesPerPoll(500);
		poller.setTrigger(new PeriodicTrigger(5000L));
		return poller;
	}
}

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