open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specification

Clarify if zero-duration spans are valid?

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#2,125 opened on Nov 15, 2021

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Description

What are you trying to achieve?

Should we provide clarification if zero-duration spans are valid? Basing on opentelemetry-proto those seem to be OK, however I wasn't able to find this mentioned anywhere in the tracing specs.

If such spans are acceptable, it is not clear how they should be interpreted (not sure if on any currently existing platform monotonic clock could measure less than 1 nanosecond)

Also, perhaps this is obvious but I haven't found a piece of specification mentioning that end timestamp must be greater or equal to start timestamp (like in the proto comments)

Overall, this is perhaps a rather minor issue but saw some confusion over that so I am brining it up here for discussion

Contributor guide

Research direction
Review the OpenTelemetry proto span comments and the tracing specification for duration handling. Propose clarifying text that zero duration spans are valid and that end timestamp must be >= start timestamp.
Tech stack
None
Domain
observabilitybackend
Issue type
Documentation
DifficultyEstimated implementation difficulty for a new contributor, from 1 for very small changes to 5 for expert-level work.
2
Estimated timeA rough time range for an experienced contributor to investigate, implement, test, and prepare a pull request.
1-3 hours
Activity statusHow available the issue appears right now: fresh, active, stale, blocked, or waiting on maintainer input.
Active
ClarityHow clearly the issue explains the expected change, acceptance criteria, and next step.
Clear
Prerequisites
OpenTelemetry conceptsGit
Newbie friendlinessA 1-100 score estimating how approachable this issue is for first-time contributors.
70