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Important: This documentation is about an older version. It's relevant only to the release noted, many of the features and functions have been updated or replaced. Please view the current version.

Open source

Configuring Grafana Mimir tracing

Grafana Mimir uses Jaeger to implement distributed tracing. Jaeger is a valuable tool for troubleshooting the behavior of Grafana Mimir in production.

Dependencies

Set up Jaeger deployment to collect and store traces from Grafana Mimir. A deployment includes either the Jaeger all-in-one binary, or a distributed system of agents, collectors, and queriers. If you run Grafana Mimir on Kubernetes, refer to Jaeger Kubernetes.

Configuration

To configure Grafana Mimir to send traces, perform the following steps:

  1. Set the JAEGER_AGENT_HOST environment variable in all components to point to the Jaeger agent.
  2. Enable sampling in the appropriate components:
    • The ingester and ruler self-initiate traces and should have sampling explicitly enabled.
    • Sampling for the distributor and query-frontend can be enabled in Grafana Mimir or in an upstream service, like a proxy or gateway running in front of Grafana Mimir.

To enable sampling in Grafana Mimir components you can specify either JAEGER_SAMPLER_MANAGER_HOST_PORT for remote sampling, or JAEGER_SAMPLER_TYPE and JAEGER_SAMPLER_PARAM to manually set sampling configuration. Refer to Jaeger Client Go documentation for the full list of environment variables you can configure.

Note that you must specify one of JAEGER_AGENT_HOST or JAEGER_SAMPLER_MANAGER_HOST_PORT in each component for Jaeger to be enabled, even if you plan to use the default values.