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Developer tools · #opentelemetry
A failure needs to be narrowed down before settings are changed or operations retried. Which evidence best separates application errors from environment and dependency problems?
I'm designing the tracing pipeline for a set of services that will export OpenTelemetry spans through a Collector, and I need to pick a sampling strategy before rollout. The two documented options pull in opposite directions. With head-based sampling (for example a ParentBased sampler wrapping TraceIdRatioBased in the SDK), the decision happens at span creat
OpenTelemetry Java instrumentation automatically extracts the W3C Tracecontext traceparent header from incoming HTTP requests and injects it into outbound calls at the server and client boundaries. When a service introduces custom middleware between the servlet container and application handlers, or when request processing moves to an async or multi-threaded
Determine whether OpenTelemetry should provide a dedicated API for configuring timeouts on individual spans, rather than relying exclusively on context‑propagated deadlines. The specification leaves the exact moment a span is considered “ended” versus “aborted” to each SDK implementation, leading to differences in recorded duration and attributes after a can
Under concurrent request load, OpenTelemetry SDK span processors force a documented trade-off between request-path latency and telemetry completeness. SimpleSpanProcessor exports each span synchronously on the thread that ends it, keeping telemetry latency low but adding export overhead directly to concurrent request handling. BatchSpanProcessor queues spans
Problem OpenTelemetry auto‑instrumentation libraries default to a probability sampler (often 10% for Java, 5% for Python) to limit trace volume. The SDK exposes a sampler configuration API, but changing the sampler at runtime requires code changes or a restart; no cross‑language, environment‑variable override is defined in the core spec. Vendor exporters (Ja
The OpenTelemetry Collector can buffer spans, metrics, and logs to disk using the file_storage extension and a persistent queue so that telemetry survives a backend outage and drains after restart. The queue provides at-least-once delivery, which means an unclean shutdown may cause the Collector to resend events already accepted by the backend. The Collector
Goal Reduce alert noise when the BatchSpanProcessor logs Failed to export span during brief network hiccups while preserving visibility into real data loss. Constraints The SDK currently lacks a retry configuration, so transient failures are logged immediately and can trigger alerts on every occurrence. Users often rely on the Collector’s retry_on_failure bl
Problem Statement OpenTelemetry records span start and end times as 64‑bit nanosecond epoch values (e.g., start_time_unix_nano ), which are implicitly UTC. The core specification does not attach a time‑zone identifier or civil date string to these timestamps. Unresolved Decision When a trace is consumed by a UI or exporter, the same epoch value may be render