This document contains answers to questions frequently asked by users. Just because something is listed here doesn't mean it's beyond question, so feel free to open an issue if you want to change or improve any of these things, but this should provide useful information about how things are and why they are that way.
Integrations that are considered clients (http clients, grpc clients, sql clients) do not use the globally-configured service name. This is by design and is a product-level decision that spans across all the languages' tracers. This is likely to segregate the time spent actually doing the work of the service from the time waiting for another service (i.e. waiting on a web server to return a response).
While there are good arguments to be made that client integrations should take the same service name as everything else in the service, that's not how the library is intended to function today. As a work-around, most integrations have a WithServiceName Option that will allow you to override the default. If the integration you are using cannot be configured the way you want, please open an issue to discuss adding as option.
See also: #603
This is primarily for 2 reasons:
- Cost - often a traced client will speak to a traced server. If both are measured, there is duplication of measurement here, and duplication of cost for no benefit. By measuring only the server, we get analytics without duplication.
- Name conflicts - Today, metrics are calculated based on a key of the span's service name and operation name. This can cause clashes when a client and server both use the same operation name.
For example, net/http server tracing:
span, ctx := tracer.StartSpanFromContext(cfg.Request.Context(), "http.request", opts...)
and net/http client tracing:
span, ctx := tracer.StartSpanFromContext(req.Context(), "http.request", opts...)
This is something that users ask for from time to time, and there is work internally to resolve this. Please follow #1006 to track the progress.