How to use tracing

This guide explains how to activate traces and export them to the OTEL collector

Aidbox supports exporting traces using the Protobuf protocol in line with the OTEL specification. This guide configures Aidbox to export traces to the OpenTelemetry collector, but the setup can also be modified to export to other traces consumers that adhere to this specification.

This way of enabling OTEL capabilities is available in Aidbox versions 2503 and later. On previous AIdbox versions it was possible to enable OTEL with Aidbox configuration project.

Prerequisites

1. OTEL collector should be deployed and configured to receive traces.

How to enable traces export to the OTEL collector

To enable exporting traces to the OTEL collector set the OTEL collector traces receiver endpoint to the Aidbox setting observability.otel.traces-url

How to pass the trace-id

You can use the traceparent header to pass the trace-id. You will see the trace-id in the traces and you can use it to correlate traces from multiple sources.

How to check the OTEL collector receives traces

Set up debug exporter and traces pipeline in the OTEL collector configuration:

receivers:
receivers:
  otlp:
    protocols:
      http:
        endpoint: <your-collector-resiever-endpoint>

exporters:
  debug:
    verbosity: detailed

service:
  pipelines:
    traces:
      receivers: [otlp]
      exporters: [debug] # OTEL prints traces to the stdout

See Aidbox traces in the OTEL collector stdout

Open OTEL collector stdout and see the traces.

Check traces sending status

The common endpoint for checking the status of sending metrics process

GET /telemetry/main/otel-trace-exporter/$status

queue-size: 10
history:
- ts: 1700661071
  processed-count: 34

Force flush OTEL traces

To force flush all the traces Aidbox has in the queue use $flush endpoint:

POST /telemetry/main/otel-trace-exporter/$flush

Check all available Aidbox OTEL traces exporter configuration options are here:

OTEL traces exporter parameters