How to best implement a OTel exporting shim

[plajjan]

I'm trying to implement a sort of shim layer that takes tracing information in a proprietary format and convert it to OTel. Thus, I can't instrument my code in the normal OTel way. I have currently hacked together a solution where I directly instantiate SpanContexts and Spans from the SDK. It's slightly messy and I'm afraid of using things that seem internal, however I found no other way of achieving what I want.

Originally I was using the higher level API with a tracer object and calling start_span on that, however, it doesn't allow me to feed in the trace_id or span_id. I have that information from the source data, so I have to propagate it. Using the internal objects was the only way I found to do that.

Does anyone have any guidance? Should I continue to use the internal objects and risk breakage on new releases?

Or should perhaps the tracer start_span method take optional arguments for trace_id and span_id? If so, I could open a feature enhancement issue for that.

[srikanthccv]

I am not really sure if I understood you correctly but does this #1152 and #1153 help you?

[plajjan]

@lonewolf3739 I don't believe it helps me, unfortunately. The way I read #1152 and #1153, it is about being able to specify your own generator for IDs. I don't want to generate any IDs at all, rather the IDs are already computed by another system! I just want to insert them into the OTel flow. That would be possible if I could build a mock-generator where I'd simply feed in existing values that would then be used (would have to be done on a per-span basis, so mapping is right) but that does not appear possible. The interface to IdsGenerator (https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-python/blob/master/opentelemetry-sdk/src/opentelemetry/sdk/trace/ids_generator.py) doesn't take any arguments at all.

ISTM that I need start_span (in

opentelemetry-python/opentelemetry-sdk/src/opentelemetry/sdk/trace/__init__.py

Line 774 in 09ac955

def start_span( # pylint: disable=too-many-locals

) to take another two arguments for trace-id & span-id.

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[plajjan]

Nope, still relevant. Don't close it bot!

[lzchen]

@plajjan
I believe one way of doing this is to implement generate_trace_id and generate_span_id to use a callback to be able to use a passed in trace_id and span_id during runtime. The downside of this is that you will have to modify this callback return value for every single span you want to create.

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This issue was marked stale due to lack of activity. It will be closed in 30 days.

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Closed as inactive. Feel free to reopen if this issue needs resolving.