can Foxx-tracer replace Jaeger?

[mingfang]

I'm thinking Foxx-tracer and collector can be a complete tracing solution like Jaeger.
Instead of using a reporter to push to external systems, why not just leave the data in arangodb?
That way I can use the full power of AQL to query the data.
The only thing missing seems to be a set of foxx routes that can receive external traces via http.
What do you think?

[adityamukho]

This is actually already possible since an HTTP endpoint exists to push traces[] to the collector. A couple of additional steps are needed though:

1. Stop the cron script at scripts/reportTraces.js, installed by scripts/setup.js at install time. This can be made configurable at runtime by providing an HTTP route to start/stop the cron job.
2. Optionally, delete the TTL index on the dtime field for better insert speeds, since spans will now be permanent residents in the database.

The only slight drawback that keeps this solution from being instantly usable is the lack of ready-made dashboards to display the span/trace data. It shouldn't be too much trouble whipping up the appropriate queries on something like Grafana though.

Altogether I think this is a good idea to develop further, since raw AQL gives you incredible expressive power for your queries. Some pre-built dashboards for the most popular front-ends would need to built IMO for this to be rapidly adopted.

I'm curious to see how far this idea can be developed. I would welcome your inputs / PRs in this regard.