Starting a new span from a context.Context is too laborious

[seh]

After using the opentelemetry-go library for a few days, I find it to be tediously verbose compared to my touchstone: Honeycomb's beeline-go library. My focus is on the task I perform most frequently in my code: starting a new span from a context.Context.

In opentelemetry-go today, the call sequence looks approximately like either

trace.SpanFromContext(ctx).Tracer().Start(ctx, ...

or

trace.SpanFromContext(ctx).Tracer().WithSpan(ctx, ...

This winds up performing the exact same context.Context lookup three times—extract a Span to get the current Tracer, then use that Tracer to start a new Span, which in turn tries to find the current Span in that same context.Context twice (the extra lookup buried in parent.GetSpanContextAndLinks). The result induces no change to the Tracer in use.

By contrast, beeline-go offers the StartSpan function. It wraps up that first call sequence above more concisely and more efficiently. It's true that there's no notion of an active Tracer whose implementation could vary, but in most cases that possibility is not relevant in the application or library code being instrumented. Looking around in opentelemetry-go, I know that there's also global.Tracer(string), which could cut down on the search for the current Tracer, but that forces a map lookup and risks pulling in the wrong Tracer.

Was there ever a function considered for this library like beeline-go's StartSpan? For an API that aspires to only publish interfaces, I can see how offering a concrete function like that is an odd duck, but it could live in the SDK.

[seh]

For those with access to the "Honeycomb Pollinators" Slack team, we discussed this topic over the last few days in the "discuss-opentelemetry-beta" channel.

[rghetia]

The intention was to have tracer work like a logger in each component.

var (
   tr = global.Tracer("example.com/componentA")
)

func DoWork(ctx context.Context) {
    ctx, span := tr.Start(ctx, "Some work")
}

[seh]

Thank you for the suggestion, @rghetia, and for the follow-on discussion on today's SIG call. I'll try using this pattern and report back here shortly.

[seh]

The pattern that @rghetia has been working well for me. Thank you for the advice.

For now, I don't see the Tracer's name emitted in any span attributes. Is there any plan to do so?

[Aneurysm9]

For now, I don't see the Tracer's name emitted in any span attributes. Is there any plan to do so?

I'm not aware of any current plans, nor am I aware of any reason not to do so. If you'd like to open a new issue with a proposal we can discuss at a future SIG meeting.

I'm going to close this issue as it appears to have been addressed.