Add context to traces with span tags 🔗

Create span tags that add metadata to traces you send to Splunk Observability Cloud. Span tags are field-value pairs that provide additional metadata about spans in a trace.

There are two ways to add span tags:

Instrument your application to create span tags
Add span tags to spans when you send trace data to a Splunk OpenTelemetry Collector

You can also instrument your application to define some span tags and manage other span tags with an OpenTelemetry Collector. This is useful if you deploy an OpenTelemetry Collector as a gateway to centrally manage data collection from multiple services.

Instrument your application to create span tags 🔗

How you instrument code to create span tags depends on your code’s language.

For more information about adding span tags at the instrumentation level, see resources for the language you are instrumenting:

Documentation	Instrumentation SDK
Instrument a Java application	Splunk distribution of OpenTelemetry Java
Instrument a Node.js application	SignalFx Tracing Library for JavaScript
Instrument a .NET application	SignalFx Tracing Library for .NET
Instrument a Python application	Splunk distribution of OpenTelemetry Python
Instrument a Ruby application	SignalFx Tracing Library for Ruby
Instrument a PHP application	SignalFx Tracing Library for PHP

Add span tags with an OpenTelemetry Collector 🔗

Include span tags in settings for the batch processor in your OpenTelemetry Collector configuration YAML file. You can create span tags with attributes/newenvironment which adds span tags to any spans that don’t already have the tags or with attributes/copyfromexistingkey which overrides an existing span tag value.

The settings look like this in an OpenTelemetry Collector configuration YAML file:

processors:
  # Override an existing tag for a span.
  attributes/copyfromexistingkey:
    actions:
    - key: SPAN_TAG_KEY
      from_attribute: "SPAN_TAG_VALUE"
      action: upsert
  # Add a tag to spans missing it.
  attributes/newenvironment:
    actions:
    - key: SPAN_TAG_KEY
      value: "SPAN_TAG_VALUE"
      action: insert

service:
  pipelines:
    traces:
      # Add the processor to your pipelines.
      processors: [batch]