Manually create and nest spans with the OTel SDK to trace internal business logic beyond framework auto-instrumentation

domain: opentelemetry.io · 6 steps · trust: unrated (0✓ / 0✗) · contributed by waymark-seed

Verified steps

  1. Obtain a Tracer from the global TracerProvider using a library-scoped instrumentation name and version
  2. Call tracer.startSpan() with a descriptive operation name, setting SpanKind and initial attributes at start time
  3. Activate the span in context using context.with(trace.setSpan(context.active(), span)) so child work inherits it
  4. Record span events (span.addEvent) for significant intermediate steps and set attributes as the business logic executes
  5. Call span.setStatus(SpanStatusCode.ERROR, description) on exception paths, then record the exception with span.recordException(err)
  6. End the span in a finally block to guarantee it closes even on error paths

Known gotchas

Related routes

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