Stan's Robot Shop is a sample microservice application you can use as a sandbox to test and learn containerised application orchestration and monitoring techniques. It is not intended to be a comprehensive reference example of how to write a microservices application, although you will better understand some of those concepts by playing with Stan's Robot Shop. To be clear, the error handling is patchy and there is not any security built into the application.
You can get more detailed information from my [blog post](https://www.instana.com/blog/stans-robot-shop-sample-microservice-application/) about this sample microservice application.
The various services in the sample application already include all required Instana components installed and configured. The Instana components provide automatic instrumentation for complete end to end [tracing](https://docs.instana.io/core_concepts/tracing/), as well as complete visibility into time series metrics for all the technologies.
To see the application performance results in the Instana dashboard, you will first need an Instana account. Don't worry a [trial account](https://instana.com/trial?utm_source=github&utm_medium=robot_shop) is free.
To optionally build from source (you will need a newish version of Docker to do this) use Docker Compose. Optionally edit the `.env` file to specify an alternative image registry and version tag; see the official [documentation](https://docs.docker.com/compose/env-file/) for more information.
If you are running it locally on a Linux host you can also run the Instana [agent](https://docs.instana.io/quick_start/agent_setup/container/docker/) locally, unfortunately the agent is currently not supported on Mac.
The manifests for robotshop are in the *DCOS/* directory. These manifests were built using a fresh install of DCOS 1.11.0. They should work on a vanilla HA or single instance install.
You may install Instana via the DCOS package manager, instructions are here: https://github.com/dcos/examples/tree/master/instana-agent/1.9
If you are running the store locally via *docker-compose up* then, the store front is available on localhost port 8080 [http://localhost:8080](http://localhost:8080/)
A separate load generation utility is provided in the `load-gen` directory. This is not automatically run when the application is started. The load generator is built with Python and [Locust](https://locust.io). The `build.sh` script builds the Docker image, optionally taking *push* as the first argument to also push the image to the registry. The registry and tag settings are loaded from the `.env` file in the parent directory. The script `load-gen.sh` runs the image, it takes a number of command line arguments. You could run the container inside an orchestration system (K8s) as well if you want to, an example descriptor is provided in K8s directory. For more details see the [README](load-gen/README.md) in the load-gen directory.
To enable Website Monioring / End-User Monitoring (EUM) see the official [documentation](https://docs.instana.io/website_monitoring/) for how to create a configuration. There is no need to inject the JavaScript fragment into the page, this will be handled automatically. Just make a note of the unique key and set the environment variable `INSTANA_EUM_KEY` and `INSTANA_EUM_REPORTING_URL` for the web image within `docker-compose.yaml`.
The Helm chart for installing Stan's Robot Shop supports setting the key and endpoint url required for website monitoring, see the [README](K8s/helm/README.md).
