Skip to content

Tracing: zero distributed propagation (no client spans) + no error status on spans #6

Description

@angelluismula

Surfaced by the Firefly platform observability E2E audit (2026-06-25, firefly-prod).

H6 — No distributed trace propagation

Every trace is confined to a single service; there is no cross-service correlation.

Evidence (GreptimeDB traces.opentelemetry_traces, firefly-prod):

  • Span kinds present: only SPAN_KIND_SERVER and SPAN_KIND_INTERNAL0 CLIENT/PRODUCER/CONSUMER spans.
  • Every trace_id maps to exactly one service_name (0 multi-service traces over 15 min).
  • Instrumentation scope is org.springframework.boot, not the OTel Java agent.

Without client spans + W3C traceparent propagation there is no root-cause diagnosis across services.

Ask: enable client auto-instrumentation (RestTemplate/WebClient/Feign/messaging) and W3C trace-context propagation in the observability foundation so outbound calls create CLIENT/PRODUCER spans and propagate traceparent.

M3 — Spans never carry error status

span_status_code = STATUS_CODE_ERROR count is 0 despite real production traffic and 5xx/exceptions.

Ask: ensure the instrumentation sets span.setStatus(ERROR) / recordException on 5xx responses and unhandled exceptions, so error spans are queryable/alertable.

Coverage context: traces flow for 76/78 firefly-prod services with complete k8s labels; these are completeness/quality gaps, not a transport break.

Metadata

Metadata

Assignees

No one assigned

    Labels

    No labels
    No labels

    Type

    No type

    Projects

    No projects

    Milestone

    No milestone

    Relationships

    None yet

    Development

    No branches or pull requests

    Issue actions