ZICO collector

This is is a next generation replacement of ZICO 1.x. While ZICO 1 was providing simple means for storing and presenting transaction traces in single JVMs, new collector overcomes many limitations by providing following features:

• full-text search capabilities across whole trace call trees - enables quick linking of traces from various sources,thus enabling tracing across many components in a distributed system;
• displaying traces from various sources in a single view (not separated as in ZICO 1.x);
• ability to work with partial (chunked) data - opens way to in-flight transaction monitoring (eg. showing places wheretransactions stuck or bogged down) and new generation, high-performance tracer implementations (by avoiding much of agent-side processing of collected data before sending to collector);
• efficient compressed trace data storage - approximately the same compression ratio as in ZICO 1.x achieved byfull normalization of stored data (all strings appear exactly once) and ;
• low overhead trace data rotation via automatic internal sharding - now across full spectrum ;

Installation

Collector is distributed as self-contained jar (uberjar) along with startup script and configuration. Home directory (unpacked from distributed package) contains following objects:

• zico.jar - application binary (uberjar);
• zico.sh - startup and control script;
• zico.conf - main configuration file;
• jvm.conf - JVM configuration options (included by startup script);
• log/* - log files (console log, main log);
• data/conf - configuration database files (if emebedded H2 is used);
• data/trace - trace datastore files;
• data/backup - directory where configuration backups are stored;

Collector requires JDK8 to run. Start collector using zico.sh script:

$ cd /opt/zico
$ ./zico.sh start

You must have either JAVA_HOME variable set in your shell profile or in jvm.conf file. ZICO will use local H2 config database by default and zico.conf file must be edited in order to switch to MySQL. Database schema will be created automatically when collector starts for the first time.

Collector web UI is available at http://localhost:8640. Default login name is admin and password is zico.

Configuring authentication

There are three authentication modes:

• :none - no authentication; unauthenticated user will have full privileges;
• :local - collector uses local database for authentication and user attributes;
• :cas10 - SSO integration using CAS 1.0 protocol; collector still uses local database for storing user attributes;