Span Receivers

A SpanReceiver is responsible for collecting spans from services, converting them to a Zipkin common Span, then passing them to the storage layer. This approach provides modularity allowing for receivers that accept any sort of data from any sort of producer. Zipkin comes with a receiver for Scribe and one for Kafka.

Scribe Receiver

Scribe was the logging framework in use at Twitter to transport trace data when Zipkin was created. That’s why there is a scribe span receiver in the project.

For small architectures tracers can be setup to send directly to the Zipkin collectors. The ScribeSpanReceiver expects a scribe log entry with a Base64 encoded, binary serialized thrift Span using the “zipkin” category (this category is configurable via command line flag). Finagle-zipkin does this automatically.