open-telemetry / open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specification

Sampling: Introduce decision/flag to not propagate a span.

Open
#1,663 1 comment 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

Nobody has claimed this yet.

area:sampling area:sdk spec:trace
Dominant language
Makefile
Stars
4.3k
Forks
1k
Avg merge
2d 7h
Merged PRs (30d)
25

Description

An idea that I had for https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specification/pull/1653#issuecomment-830025528: With the current sampling decisions, you cannot suppress propagation of a Span. You can only influence the sampled flag on the traceflags. In some situations it might be desired to not propagate the span at all cross-process, i.e. cause inject(context) to be a no-op (for the Span part of the context).

This could be added as a new sampling decision that is otherwise equivalent to DROP, or it could be added as an additional boolean flag orthogonal to the current sampling decisions to also allow e.g. RECORDING spans that are only propagated in-process (could be used in combination with the URL which might be available to samplers to not propagate span contexts to external services).

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start with the sampling decisions and context propagation behavior described in the issue, then read the referenced OpenTelemetry specification PR and comment. Compare the proposed new decision with the orthogonal-flag option, and define the resulting inject(context) behavior and compatibility expectations as the completion criteria.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Domain
distributed-systems, observability
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Quiet
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
35/100

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.