[FR] feature to add SpanLink(s) to mlflow span

Willingness to contribute

No. I cannot contribute this feature at this time.

Proposal Summary

• feature to add SpanLink(s) to Span in mlflow api
• feature to view the SpanLink(s) in tracking UI

Motivation

What is the use case for this feature?

When asynchronous distributed processing involves processes with different execution periods or timing, it is necessary to link different traces. Asynchronous distributed processing like the one described above occurs in multi-agent and closed-loop scenarios.

Why is this use case valuable to support for MLflow users in general?

It is useful for debugging complex asynchronous distributed processing scenarios.

Why is this use case valuable to support for your project(s) or organization?

It would be convenient if the experiment tracking tool provided these features. Asynchronous distributed tracing is possible with MLFlow alone.

Why is it currently difficult to achieve this use case?

This is because mlflow api does not support SpanLink. I can meet the usecase by using OpenTelemetry without using mlflow. So, in this mean it is not difficult to archive.

Details

No response

What machine learning domain(s) is this feature request about?

• domain/genai: LLMs, Agents, and other GenAI-related use cases
• domain/classical-ml: Traditional machine learning, such as linear regression.
• domain/deep-learning: Deep learning and neural networks.
• domain/platform: MLflow platform foundation, not specific to a particular machine learning domain.

What area(s) of MLflow is this feature request about?

• area/tracking: Tracking Service, tracking client APIs, autologging
• area/model-registry: Model Registry service, APIs, and the fluent client calls for Model Registry
• area/scoring: MLflow model serving, deployment tools, Spark UDFs
• area/evaluation: MLflow model evaluation features, evaluation metrics, and evaluation workflows
• area/prompt: MLflow prompt engineering features, prompt templates, and prompt management
• area/tracing: MLflow Tracing features, tracing APIs, and LLM tracing functionality
• area/gateway: MLflow AI Gateway client APIs, server, and third-party integrations
• area/projects: MLproject format, project running backends
• area/uiux: Front-end, user experience, plotting
• area/docs: MLflow documentation pages