How to continue the span with TraceID and SpanID when using Auto-Instrumentation?

[GokulShrikanth]

Hi, I am trying to trace through multiple microservices using Auto-instrumentation for java, But since I am using NATS to communicate to the services, The Trace Continuation from Service A to Service B is broken, Is there a way to resolve this? In the case of manual instrumentation, We can send the context through. Is there a way to achieve this with auto-instrumentation also?

[jkwatson]

@GokulShrikanth since this is about auto-instrumentation, I'm going to move this discussion over to the instrumentation repository.

[mateuszrzeszutek]

Hey @GokulShrikanth,

By NATS you mean https://nats.io/ ?
It looks like we don't have instrumentation for this messaging software, so unfortunately the context does not get propagated.

[GokulShrikanth]

Oh...I was able to solve it by propagating context through headers

[GokulShrikanth]

Is there a way to set automatically generated spans to a certain context?

[mateuszrzeszutek]

You mean, set the NATS headers? You can implement the TextMapSetter interface and inject the current context manually; something similar to this:

class NatsMessageHeaderSetter implements TextMapSetter<Message> {
  void set(@Nullable Message carrier, String key, String value) {
    carrier.headers().put(key, value);
  }
}

GlobalOpenTelemetry.get()
  .getContextPropagators()
  .getTextMapPropagator()
  .inject(Context.current(), message, new NatsMessageHeaderSetter());

You'll need similar code with TextMapGetter & extract() on the receiving side to get the span context across.