There are a few samples with slightly different features. You can run all of them from an IDE via the main method, or on the command line with mvn spring-boot:run. They all log trace and span data on the console by default. Here’s a list:

• spring-cloud-sleuth-sample: vanilla (no zipkin) web app that calls back to itself on various endpoints ("/", "/call", "/async")

• spring-cloud-sleuth-sample-zipkin: same as vanilla sample but with zipkin (set sample.zipkin.enabled=true if you have a collector running)

• spring-cloud-sleuth-sample-messaging: a Spring Integration application with two HTTP endpoints ("/" and "/xform")

• spring-cloud-sleuth-sample-ribbon: two endpoints ("/" and "/call") that make calls to the "zipkin" sample via Ribbon. Also has `@EnableZUulProxy" so if the other samples are running they are proxied at "/messaging", "/zipkin", "/vanilla" (see "/routes" for a list).

The Ribbon sample makes an interesting demo or playground for learning about zipkin. In the screenshot below you can see a trace with 3 spans - it starts in the "testSleuthRibbon" app and crosses to "testSleuthMessaging" for the next 2 spans.

1. Optionally run the Zipkin Server, e.g. via docker compose (there’s a docker-compose.yml in Spring Cloud Sleuth, or in Docker Zipkin

2. Run the zipkin sample application (set sample.zipkin.enabled=false if you have no Zipkin running). If you are using a VM to run docker you might need to tunnel port 9411 to localhost, or change the spring.zipkin.baseUrl.

3. Hit http://localhost:3380, http://localhost:3380/call, http://localhost:3380/async for some interesting sample traces (the app callas back to itself).

4. Go to http://localhost:9411 for Zipkin’s UI (if you are using boot2docker the host will be different)

The fact that the first trace in says "testSleuthMessaging" seems to be a bug in the UI (it has some annotations from that service, but it originates in the "testSleuthRibbon" service).