synapse/docs/opentracing.rst

===========
OpenTracing
===========

Background
----------

OpenTracing is a semi-standard being adopted by a number of distributed tracing
platforms. It is a common api for facilitating vendor-agnostic tracing
instrumentation. That is, we can use the OpenTracing api and select one of a
number of tracer implementations to do the heavy lifting in the background.
Our current selected implementation is Jaeger.

OpenTracing is a tool which gives an insight into the causal relationship of
work done in and between servers. The servers each track events and report them
to a centralised server - in Synapse's case: Jaeger. The basic unit used to
represent events is the span. The span roughly represents a single piece of work
that was done and the time at which it occurred. A span can have child spans,
meaning that the work of the child had to be completed for the parent span to
complete, or it can have follow-on spans which represent work that is undertaken
as a result of the parent but is not depended on by the parent to in order to
finish.

Since this is undertaken in a distributed environment a request to another
server, such as an RPC or a simple GET, can be considered a span (a unit or
work) for the local server. This causal link is what OpenTracing aims to
capture and visualise. In order to do this metadata about the local server's
span, i.e the 'span context', needs to be included with the request to the
remote.

It is up to the remote server to decide what it does with the spans
it creates. This is called the sampling policy and it can be configured
through Jaeger's settings.

For OpenTracing concepts see 
https://opentracing.io/docs/overview/what-is-tracing/.

For more information about Jaeger's implementation see
https://www.jaegertracing.io/docs/

=====================
Seting up OpenTracing
=====================

To receive OpenTracing spans, start up a Jaeger server. This can be done
using docker like so:

.. code-block:: bash

   docker run -d --name jaeger
     -p 6831:6831/udp \
     -p 6832:6832/udp \
     -p 5778:5778 \
     -p 16686:16686 \
     -p 14268:14268 \
     jaegertracing/all-in-one:1.13

Latest documentation is probably at
https://www.jaegertracing.io/docs/1.13/getting-started/


Enable OpenTracing in Synapse
-----------------------------

OpenTracing is not enabled by default. It must be enabled in the homeserver
config by uncommenting the config options under ``opentracing`` as shown in
the `sample config <./sample_config.yaml>`_. For example:

.. code-block:: yaml

  opentracing:
    tracer_enabled: true
    homeserver_whitelist:
      - "mytrustedhomeserver.org"
      - "*.myotherhomeservers.com"

Homeserver whitelisting
-----------------------

The homeserver whitelist is configured using regular expressions. A list of regular
expressions can be given and their union will be compared when propagating any
spans contexts to another homeserver. 

Though it's mostly safe to send and receive span contexts to and from
untrusted users since span contexts are usually opaque ids it can lead to
two problems, namely:

- If the span context is marked as sampled by the sending homeserver the receiver will
  sample it. Therefore two homeservers with wildly different sampling policies
  could incur higher sampling counts than intended.
- Sending servers can attach arbitrary data to spans, known as 'baggage'. For safety this has been disabled in Synapse
  but that doesn't prevent another server sending you baggage which will be logged
  to OpenTracing's logs.

==================
Configuring Jaeger
==================

Sampling strategies can be set as in this document:
https://www.jaegertracing.io/docs/1.13/sampling/