Capability to manually create spans

[cyrille-leclerc]

Problem description

I want to manually create spans in my pipeline, similar to manually creating spans when instrumenting applications with distributed tracing.

Example use cases

• Create a "grouping span" to group multiple atomic actions together.
  • Example: Get code from a complex Git repository incl fetching submodules
• Add events to the trace typically to add "logs"
  • Probably better solved using the concept of "span events" in OpenTelemetry API
• Add informations on shell steps to indicate the purpose of the shell step (e.g. an sh 'docker login -u $user -p $pass my.docker.registry')
  • May be better solved solving Capability to manually add attributes to spans #91

Example with the OpenTelemetry APIs for Java

Tracer tracer = null;
tracer.spanBuilder("Get code from Git (incl fetching sub modules)")
    .setAttribute("my.attribute", "my value")
    .startSpan();

See other problem statements

• Capability to manually add attributes to spans #91
• Capability to add "logs" to spans #92

Proposed solutions

createSpan pipeline step

pipeline {
    agent any
    stages {
        stage('Checkout') {
            steps {
                createSpan(name:'my-span', attributes:[TODO 'command':'git']) {
                    // TODO sequence of shell steps to `git`+ fetch git submodules
                    // Get some code from a GitHub repository
                    // git credentialsId: 'my-user-git', url: 'https://github.com/jglick/simple-maven-project-with-tests.git'
                }
            }
        }
        stage('Build') {
            steps {
                ...
            }
        }
    }
}

[ipleten]

It also might be beneficial to get id of span and of traceID to enrich trace with data from other tools.
Like we have deployment tool being triggered within pipeline which we can update to send spans to current trace therefore we could track deployment status linked to pipeline.

[kuisathaverat]

Does the following pipeline code do the same? I think so

def my_span(List spanAttributes, Closure body) {
    withSpanAttributes(spanAttributes) {
        body()
    }
}

pipeline {
    agent any
    stages {
        stage('Checkout') {
            steps {
                my_span([spanAttribute(key: "test.tool", value: "junit")]) {
                    // TODO sequence of shell steps to `git`+ fetch git submodules
                    // Get some code from a GitHub repository
                    // git credentialsId: 'my-user-git', url: 'https://github.com/jglick/simple-maven-project-with-tests.git'
                }
            }
        }
        stage('Build') {
            steps {
                ...
            }
        }
    }
}

[kuisathaverat]

I am wrong; the functions and shared library steps do not create a new span. I will review if it is possible to generate a span there.

[roeycarmi]

Hello, I am really looking forward the ability to create my own spans while still being part of the auto genrated trace created by the plugin.

I followed the #84 PR for a long time and I don't understand why is it closed?
Would mean a lot to my team, and thanks for everyone involved :)