Before you can view the trace data of your application in the Tracing Analysis console, you must use a client to report the trace data to Tracing Analysis. This topic shows you how to use SkyWalking to report the data of Java applications.

Prerequisites

  • SkyWalking 6.X.X, 7.X.X, or 8.X.X is downloaded from the Download the SkyWalking releases page. We recommend that you download SkyWalking 8.0.1. The decompressed folder Agent is placed in a directory that can be accessed by Java processes.
  • All plug-ins are placed in the /plugins directory. If you add a plug-in to the directory during the startup phase, the plug-in takes effect. If you delete a plug-in from the directory, the plug-in becomes ineffective. By default, log files are saved in the /logs directory.
Warning Logs, plug-ins, and configuration files are all placed in the Agent folder. Do not change the folder structure.

  1. Log on to the Tracing Analysis console. In the left-side navigation pane, click Cluster Configurations.
  2. On the Cluster Configurations tab, click the Access point information tab. Then, turn on Show Token for the Cluster Information parameter.
  3. Set the Client parameter to SkyWalking.
  4. In the Related Information column of the table in the lower part, click the copy icons next to the endpoint and agent.authentication information that you want to use.

Tracing Analysis Endpoint for SkyWalking

Note: If you deploy your application in an Alibaba Cloud production environment, select a VPC endpoint. Otherwise, select a public endpoint.

Background information

SkyWalking is a popular application performance monitoring (APM) service developed in China. SkyWalking is designed for microservices, cloud-native architectures, and container-based architectures. Container-based architectures include Docker, Kubernetes, and Mesos. The core of SkyWalking is a distributed tracing system.

To use SkyWalking to report Java application data to the Tracing Analysis console, you must first instrument the application. SkyWalking not only provides auto-instrument agents such as Dubbo, gRPC, JDBC, OkHttp, Spring, Tomcat, Struts, and Jedis, but also allows you to manually instrument applications. This topic shows you how to automatically instrument applications.

The following figure shows how to report data by using SkyWalking.

Report Tracing Data By Skywalking

Use SkyWalking to automatically instrument a Java application

  1. Open the config/agent.config file and configure the endpoint and token.
    Notice Replace <endpoint> and <auth-token> with the endpoint and authentication token of the SkyWalking client in the corresponding region that are displayed on the Overview page. For more information, see How to get Endpoint and Security Token. 
    collector.backend_service=<endpoint>
agent.authentication=<auth-token>
  2. Use one of the following methods to set the service name of the application:
    Notice Replace <ServiceName> with your application name. If you use both of the following methods, only the second method that adds a parameter to the start command takes effect.

    • Open the config/agent.config file and set the application name. 

      agent.service_name=<ServiceName>

    • Add the -Dskywalking.agent.service_name parameter to the start command of the application. 

      java -javaagent:<skywalking-agent-path> -Dskywalking.agent.service_name=<ServiceName> -jar yourApp.jar
  3. Use one of the following methods to specify the path to the Agent folder based on the runtime environment of the application:
    Note Replace <skywalking-agent-path> in the following sample code with the absolute path of the skywalking-agent.jar file in the Agent folder.

    • Linux Tomcat 7 / Tomcat 8

      Add the following content as the first line in the tomcat/bin/catalina.sh file: 

      CATALINA_OPTS="$CATALINA_OPTS -javaagent:<skywalking-agent-path>"; export CATALINA_OPTS

    • Windows Tomcat 7 / Tomcat 8

      Add the following content as the first line in the tomcat/bin/catalina.bat file: 

      set "CATALINA_OPTS=-javaagent:<skywalking-agent-path>"

    • JAR File or Spring Boot

      Add the -javaagent parameter to the start command of the application.

      Notice The -javaagent parameter must be written before the -jar parameter. 
      java -javaagent:<skywalking-agent-path> -jar yourApp.jar

    • Jetty

      Add the following content to the {JETTY_HOME}/start.ini configuration file: 

      --exec    # Remove the number sign (#) to uncomment the code.
-javaagent:<skywalking-agent-path>
  4. Restart the application.

FAQ

Q: Why am I unable to create an application after SkyWalking is properly connected to the server?

A: The data may not be reported to Tracing Analysis. You must check whether the data is reported to Tracing Analysis. For example, you can check the content in the {skywalking agent path}/logs/skywalking-api.log file. If the result in the following figure is returned, the data is reported.pg_xtrace_skywalking

If no data is reported, check whether sampling is enabled, the data is filtered, or the request for using Tracing Analysis is not triggered.