OTEL `chat` spans do not have the proper parent span for subagents
Nobody has claimed this yet.
Assessment
- Difficulty
- 3/5
- Estimated time
- 1-2 days
- Newbie friendliness
- 55/100
- Issue type
- Bug
- Clarity
- Mostly clear
- Activity status
- Active
- Tech stack
- shell
- Domain
- observability
Research direction
Reproduce the trace with OTEL enabled using multiple task-tool subagents, then inspect the resulting invoke_agent, execute_tool, and chat spans. Trace the span-parenting path and verify that each chat span is grouped under the appropriate invoke_agent span and that github.copilot.turn_id values are no longer mixed between subagents.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Description
Describe the bug
When OTEL is enabled and copilot uses the task tool to start a subagent, an invoke_agent span is created which contains all the execute_tool spans, but a single chat span at the very beginning. All other chat spans do not have the appropriate parent set to the invoke_agent span.
This is especially confusing when copilot starts multiple subagents, because then the chat spans are all mixed together, and the github.copilot.turn_id do not make sense.
Affected version
No response
Steps to reproduce the behavior
- Enable OTEL
- Ask copilot to use the task tool multiple times, e.g. "Using the task tool, ask three sub-agents to summarize the last five commits of this project, then compare their summaries."
- Inspect the OTEL trace
Expected behavior
No response
Additional context
No response
- Dominant language
- Shell
- Stars
- 11.2k
- Forks
- 1.9k
- Avg merge
- 14h 16m
- Merged PRs (30d)
- 6
Contributor guide
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