Ability to send spans directly to collector over HTTP

[maackle]

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First of all, I'm new to Jaeger so I don't know if I'm asking exactly the right question. But, it seems like rustracing_jaeger is a client which requires a jaeger-agent to be running on the same machine (or the jaeger-all-in-one docker image which also includes a jaeger-agent).

Is there any way to configure the client to bypass the Agent and send spans to a remote Collector directly over HTTP, i.e. using port 14268 in the default Collector config? If not, how hard would this be to add? I would consider adding it if you don't want to, and if it would be beneficial for others, because it would certainly be beneficial for me. Any advice on this?

[sile]

Thank you for your question and proporsal.

it seems like rustracing_jaeger is a client which requires a jaeger-agent to be running on the same machine

Yes, your understanding is correct. For now, this crate doesn't provide a way to send spans to the HTTP endpoint of a remote jaeger-collector. Unfortunately, I don't have enough time to implement it, but it's welcome to add the feature if you could.

how hard would this be to add?

I'm unfamiliar with Jaeger's HTTP API, so I cannot answer this question confidently. Just an FYI, I recently received a PR sile/jaeger_passage#3 of which motivation is the same with this issue (note that jaeger_passage is an Erlang jaeger client library, not Rust). As far as looking the part of the PR diff (see below), it seems not so difficult to implement this feature:

% https://github.com/sile/jaeger_passage/pull/3/files#diff-8cbacd3c0416a7088fa351521f45d743R168-R172
Name = maps:get('location.application', passage_span:get_tags(Span), DefaultName),
Message = jaeger_passage_thrift:make_batch(Name, Tags, [Span]),
Encoded = thrift_protocol:encode_struct(Message, binary),
Headers = [?CONTENT_TYPE],
HttpClient(URI, post, Headers, Encoded, Options),

Anyway, if you could create a draft PR, I would review it and help you if needed.