LS Trace Client

Lightstep will be EOLing ls-trace tracers in the near future.

• All new users are recommended to use OpenTelemetry.
• For those currently using these tracers, we will be reaching out in Q3 2021 to ensure you have a smooth transition to OpenTelemetry. If for any reason you find a gap with OpenTelemetry for your use case, please reach out to your Customer Success representative to discuss and set up time with our Data Onboarding team.

Datadog has generously announced the donation of their tracer libraries to the OpenTelemetry, project. Auto-instrumentation is a core feature of these libraries, making it possible to create and collect telemetry data without needing to change your code. LightStep wants you to be able to use these libraries now! ls-trace is LightStep's fork of Datadog’s tracing client for Ruby. You can install and use it to take advantage of auto-instrumentation without waiting for OpenTelemetry. Each LightStep agent is “pinned” to a Datadog release and is fully supported by LightStep’s Customer Success team.

gem install ls-trace

To send data from your system to LightStep, you need to configure the tracing client to:

• Point to your satellites
• Send global tags required by LightStep to ingest and display your data

Set the following environment variables to the host and port of your satellite:

DD_AGENT_HOST=<Satellite host>
DD_TRACE_AGENT_PORT=<Satellite port>

If you’re using Lightstep’s Public Satellites, you need to run a proxy that encrypts the trace payload before it reaches Lightstep. Point your tracer to the Proxy instead of the Satellites. The proxy can be run as a side-car to your application. Lightstep provides a docker image to make this simple.

To start the proxy with defaults, run:

docker run -p 8126:8126 lightstep/reverse-proxy:latest

You can see the complete list of options using the --help flag

docker run lightstep/reverse-proxy:latest --help

If you run the proxy on localhost and port 8126 no additional configuration is needed. If you are running on a different host or port you'll need to set the following enviroment variables:

DD_AGENT_HOST=<proxy host>
DD_TRACE_AGENT_PORT=<proxy port>

LightStep requires two global tags, lightstep.service_name and lightstep.access_token to be set on spans for ingest.

You can configure global tags when configuring the Datadog tracer. See the example below:

Datadog.configure do |c|
  # setup integrations, etc...
  c.tracer tags: {
    'lightstep.service_name' => 'my-service-name',
    'lightstep.access_token' => 'my-token'
  }
end

For an overview of using the LightStep Datadog Ruby Tracing Client see the ruby auto-instrumentation overview.

For installation, configuration, and details about using the API, check out our API documentation

ls-trace follows its own versioning scheme. The table below shows the corresponding dd-trace-rb versions.

Contact support@lightstep.com for additional questions and resources, or to be added to our community slack channel.

This is a fork of dd-trace-rb and retains the original Datadog license and copyright. See the license for more details.