Finalize experimental connection Activities

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Assessment

Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Newbie friendliness
25/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
csharp
Domain
observability

Research direction

Start by reviewing PR #103922, its linked design comment, semantic-conventions PR #1192, and the referenced documentation discussion. Trace the four experimental connection activities and the span-link visualization concerns. Done requires an agreed design, finalized semantic conventions, instrumentation changes, and coordination with monitoring tool authors.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

area-System.Net

#103922 introduced experimental connection tracing, adding 4 optional activities to enable tracking HTTP connection setup, DNS lookup, socket connect, and TLS handshake. The feature has been marked experimental because of problems with span link visualization in existing monitoring tools (https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specification/discussions/4130). These problems can be addressed by (1) introducing new OTel semantic conventions to mark the links that can result in a high number of backlings so they can be visualized differently, (2) implementing the new semconv in our instrumentation, and (3) working with monitoring tool authors so they can tune their visualization logic.

During the finalization work we have an opportunity to adjust the design and the implementation meaning that we can revisit the design decisions noted in https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/pull/103922#issuecomment-2214295290, and formalized in https://github.com/open-telemetry/semantic-conventions/pull/1192. For example, we should consider linking failed connection setup spans to the (failed) requests that initiated the connection injection as suggested in https://github.com/dotnet/docs/pull/43872#discussion_r1876823555.

Dominant language
C#
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Forks
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