Tracking Issue: Fine-Grained Tracing for PowerContext

Goal

Track the remaining tracing work on top of PowerContext's OpenTelemetry support.

This issue replaces #159 and the tracing requirements in #1163.

Current support

• W3C Trace Context propagation
• Optional OTLP export
• HTTP and MCP ingress spans
• Application operation spans
• Outbound PowerContext Client spans
• Request, trace, and span correlation in logs

Remaining work

• Document OpenTelemetry Collector and trace backend setup
• Trace Memory search and retrieval stages
• Trace reranking and context preparation
• Trace Memory capture, extraction, indexing, and persistence
• Trace generation, embedding, and other remote calls
• Trace scheduled and background processing
• Test span hierarchy, outcomes, and context propagation

Constraints

• Do not record queries, prompts, responses, Memory content, or vectors.
• Keep span attributes bounded.
• Tracing must remain optional and must not affect Runtime behavior.
• Do not store traces or build a trace viewer in PowerContext.
• Keep the existing operation names and W3C propagation contract.

References

• docs/en/rfcs/0046_observability_foundations.md
• src/powercontext/server/tracing.py
• src/powercontext/client/tracing.py

Start with docs/en/rfcs/0046_observability_foundations.md and inspect src/powercontext/server/tracing.py and src/powercontext/client/tracing.py. Map the unchecked tracing stages and the existing operation and propagation contracts before locating their implementation points. Done means the remaining stages and span hierarchy are covered without recording sensitive data, changing Runtime behavior, or breaking optional tracing.