Would like to set TraceID and SpanID

[ham1]

We are trying to use this for a complex build pipeline, it works inside jobs (we create a known root span ID and trace ID and then set TRACEPARENT at the start of each job)
However, we can't find a way to send the root span at the end of the pipeline.
If we could specify the trace ID and span ID then this would work for us.
Thank you!

[tobert]

🤔 This will be a little tricky because opentelemetry-go (by way of the specs) makes it difficult to set your own trace/span id. I like the idea though and will try a few things next week.

[wushujames]

I think it's possible to provide your own ID generator.

https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-go/blob/6a95d5770c347859d7b71dc660361f875f3d44fb/sdk/trace/tracer.go#L89

[tobert]

The PR linked is where I think I will end up, but also I tracked down how to configure the idGenerators. It's a viable approach but also a hack which is why I'm considering the direct-to-protobuf PR in #175.

https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-go/blob/6a95d5770c347859d7b71dc660361f875f3d44fb/sdk/trace/provider.go#L329

[ham1]

I can see a lot of work on the PR, so thank you, just wanted to check if you had an ETA for this as we'd love to use this feature.
Thank you!

[ham1]

I noticed the PR #175 has been merged, does this now solve this issue?
If so, how and can we please have a release, if not, what more needs doing? We might have some time to help with another PR.

[tobert]

@ham1 175 doesn't totally solve the issue, but makes it easy to add what you need. I'm swamped the next couple weeks but will try to get the PR out there, unless you beat me to it.

As for release, I have a few follow-ups to 175 to finish up then I should definitely do a release. Maybe 2 weeks from now? I'm open to cutting v0.4.0 sooner and going incremental if it helps you out.

[tobert]

Looks like adding a command-line flag to span.go and conditions to NewProtobufSpanWithConfig()

otel-cli/otelcli/protobuf_span.go

Line 56 in e0426f8

func NewProtobufSpanWithConfig(c Config) tracepb.Span {

this seems ok:
otel-cli span --span-id ${span_id} --trace-id ${trace_id} --name "root trace" --start "${start_time}" --end "${end_time}"
or should it be a bit more explicit?
otel-cli span --force-span-id $span_id?

I don't like the latter. otel-cli users know wtf they're doing usually. OTel spec doesn't like allowing it. But otel-cli has to make a lot of compromises anyways. I can be convinced.

[tobert]

@ham1 I merged #210 so head should let you do what you want. That was the last issue so I'll start work on releasing v0.3.0 this week.

[ham1]

That's great, thank you. Should we add some examples to the README and add them to the table of arguments?