In addition to automatic instrumentation as provided by OpenTelemetry, additional options exist to enhance your trace data.
If you have structured logging but are not using an OpenTelemetry-compatible library, add tracing metadata to your existing structured logs. Honeycomb reconstructs your traces from the metadata you provide in your events.
To manually construct tracing metadata, generate unique trace and span IDs and thread them through your applications. Your span, parent span, and trace IDs must accurately reflect the relationships between all the spans that make up a trace. For distributed services, downstream services need trace and span IDs from the services that called them.
You should manually include the same key/value pairs in your log events as in the table above.
The trace_id, span_id, and parent_id must come through to Honeycomb as strings.
(The strings may be all numeric, but the JSON package should enclose them in quotes.)
The root span of a trace is defined by having its parent_id omitted.
Honeycomb also expects all events to contain a timestamp field. If a timestamp is not provided, the server will associate the current time of ingest with the given payload. With tracing, this will result in nonsensical waterfall diagrams, with parent spans appearing to start after their child spans have completed.
X-Honeycomb-Event-Time header.
The timestamp itself should be in RFC3339 high precision format (for example, YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SS.mmmZ) or a unix epoch timestamp (seconds since 1970) with second or greater precision (for example, 1452759330927).timestamp field.
More on that here.A root span, the first span in a trace, does not have a parent.
As you instrument your code, make sure every span propagates its trace.trace_id and trace.span_id to any child spans it calls, so that the child span can use those values as its trace.trace_id and trace.parent_id.
Honeycomb uses these relationships to determine the order spans execute and construct the waterfall diagram.
Send each complete instrumented event after its unit of work finishes. You can do this with Honeytail or a Honeycomb SDK. The Honeycomb examples repository on GitHub has instrumentation examples for several languages.
See an example of manual tracing with Golang with the Wiki Tracing Example App using Libhoney Go.
See an example of manual tracing with Ruby with the Wiki Tracing Example App using Libhoney Ruby
Service datasets are created from the value of your configured service name.
Traces are sent to services datasets where you can query across a single service or across an entire environment.
If a service.name is unavailable for your event, it will be sent to an unknown_service dataset where you can troubleshoot your instrumentation.
If you are a team owner and need to update the trace schema for a dataset because the data you are sending has changed field names, you can do this in your Dataset’s Definitions tab for that dataset’s details.
Span Annotations are a special kind of event used with tracing data. Span Annotations are visualized differently in Honeycomb, they are not shown in the Waterfall graph. Instead, when you select a Span that has Annotations, they appear as tabbed entries in the tracing sidebar for that Span.
Honeycomb supports two types of Span Annotations: Span Events and Links.
Span Events are timestamped structured logs (aka events), without a duration. They occur during the course of a Span and can be thought of as annotations on the Span. For example, you might have a Span that represents a specific operation in your service. That operation could have a loop, in which a non-fatal error can occur. If you write the error to an error field on the Span, you will overwrite any previous errors (from previous loop iterations) recorded in that field. This is a perfect use case for Span Events, the error events can be attached as Span Event Annotations and you capture all the errors.
For Honeycomb to recognize Span Events, you must tag these events with meta.annotation_type: span_event.
Do not attach this field to regular trace spans.
Any span that contains this field will not be counted towards the total span count for the trace.
To use Span Events, include the following key/value pairs in your event.
| Field | Description |
|---|---|
meta.annotation_type |
Must be "span_event" |
trace.parent_id |
The span ID this span event will be attached to |
trace.trace_id |
The ID of the trace this span event belongs |
name |
The name of the span |
service.name |
The name of the service in which the span event occurred (optional) |
As with other events, Span Events should be associated with a timestamp.
The field used to tell Honeycomb which field represent Span Annotations can be configured in your dataset’s settings page on the Definitions tab.
A span may be linked to zero or more other spans or traces that are causally related. They can point to another span within the same trace or a span in a different trace. The tracing data model focuses on the parent-child relationship between spans, and most spans can be adequately described with just a span id, a parent span id, and a trace ID. However, in some special cases, it may be useful to describe a less direct causal relationship between spans. Links are optional, but can be useful for expressing a causal relationship to one or more spans or traces elsewhere in your dataset. Links can be used to represent batched operations where a span was initiated by multiple initiating spans, each representing a single incoming item being processed in the batch.
For Honeycomb to recognize Link Annotations, you must tag these events with meta.annotation_type: link.
To use links, include the following key/value pairs in your link event:
| Field | Description |
|---|---|
meta.annotation_type |
Must be "link" |
trace.parent_id |
The span ID this link will be attached to |
trace.trace_id |
The ID of the trace this link belongs to |
trace.link.span_id |
The span ID you wish to link to |
trace.link.trace_id |
The trace ID you wish to link to |
You can tell Honeycomb which fields you would like used for these in your dataset’s settings on the Definitions tab.