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Add new attributes to simplify generating span names

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Assessment

Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Newbie friendliness
25/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Domain
observability-sre

Research direction

Review the existing span attribute conventions for file, FAAS, middleware, resource, and UI spans, then compare them with the cases listed in issue #87. Done should be a resolved set of accepted attribute names and semantics for the affected span categories.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

Feature Spans

Right now, it's not convenient to generate a name attribute for some spans. The most flexible case is to be able to create a span name from available attributes, but sometimes the attributes are not there, which makes life harder.

e.g., Imagine the product takes in a span with the op "file.write", and wants to create a name field, which should be "File read". The span name "File read" could be conveniently generated from attributes if the span had an attribute called file.operation (or similar), then the SDK (or product code) could generate the name by concatenating the word "File" and the file.operation attribute.

Here are some cases that would benefit from extra attributes:

  • File spans don't have an attribute to represent the filesystem operation. Possible solution: file.operation attribute that contains a string like "read"

  • FAAS function spans don't have an attribute that represents the FAAS provider. Possible solution: faas.name attribute that contains a string like "AWS Lambda". In OTLP this is an attribute on the resource!

  • Middleware spans don't have an attribute to represent the name of the middleware. Possible solution: middleware.name attribute

  • Middleware spans don't have an attribute to represent the name of the framework. Possible solution: http.framework attribute that contains a string like "Django"

  • Resource spans don't have an attribute to represent the resource type. Possible solution resource.type attribute that contains a string like "img" or "css"

  • UI spans don't have an attribute that represents the action type. Possible solution: ui.action.type attribute that contains a string like "click"

Dominant language
TypeScript
Stars
16
Forks
6
Avg merge
2d 9h
Merged PRs (30d)
63

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