Add ability to query for child spans based on their parent spans

[kylannjohnson]

Problem Statement

I want to query for all of the spans that are child spans of a root span (or trace or transaction) that has tags or measurements. Right now, you can only reference a root-span/transaction via the transaction searchable field. This is useful, but i'd like to be able to tag a transaction with a value and query for spans related to that value.

Solution Brainstorm

filter: transaction.tag[tag-name]:tag-value or transaction_tags.tag_name:tag-value. Then `span.description would be all of the child spans that meet that criteria.

Product Area

Explore

[linear]

ENG-5566 Add ability to query for child spans based on their parent spans

[getsantry]

Assigning to @getsentry/support for routing ⏲️

[Dhrumil-Sentry]

Thanks a lot for this feedback - We intend to tackle this in the future but don't have an ETA

In the interim time - have you tried using the before() method hooks to try attaching these as attributes on your spans ?

[kylannjohnson]

@Dhrumil-Sentry Yes, that is the workaround we are implementing but it seems like a waste of resources. I'm open to other solutions, but i just don't want to repeat "global" identifies on every span.

[getsantry]

Routing to @getsentry/product-owners-explore for triage ⏲️

[Dhrumil-Sentry]

We're discussing this internally - We are considering 2 paths - Building SDK APIs that make it easy to attach attributes to all your span and not have to use beforeSend() hooks and we plan to add a number of default attributes to all spans as well - But both of these things will need time and new SDK versions that will release post Nov

beforeSend() is the most viable thing for the near term