How to stop creating spans under the same trace?

[GokulShrikanth]

Hi guys,
I am continuously polling a message queue(RMQ) inside a vertx timer, This is causing the issue of making all the spans to be under the same trace ID whereas I want the individual messages to be different traces. Is there a way to break the context and create traces for every message individually?

[mateuszrzeszutek]

Hey @GokulShrikanth ,
Are you using plain OTel Tracer/SpanBuilder API? Or opentelemetry-instrumentation-api's Instrumenter?
If it's the former, you can use setParent()/setNoParent() to explicitly set the parent context - either one with a span extracted from incoming message, or one without a span whatsoever.
If you're using Instrumenter you can pass the context of your choosing to the start() method - again, one extracted from the message, or Context.root() (which is empty).

[GokulShrikanth]

Hi @mateuszrzeszutek ,
I am using the Tracer/SpanBuilder API's.. But I am not creating any manual spans over the method I use for polling, I am sharing the snipet of code where I face this issue below

private void getNewRequest() {
    String res = RabbitmqBroker.getMessageFromQueue();
    if (res != null) {
        try {
            processMsg(res);
        } catch (Exception exception) {
           logException(exception, "getNewRequest");
        }
        getNewRequest();
    } else {
        getVertx().setTimer(6000, id -> {
            getNewRequest();
        });
    }
}

[mateuszrzeszutek]

Hm, I see - I suppose the RabbitmqBroker.getMessageFromQueue() call does the basicGet() call underneath.

You could forcefully suppress the context propagation by making Context.root() the current context for the execution of this method:

private void getNewRequest() {
    try (Scope ignored = Context.root()) {
        String res = RabbitmqBroker.getMessageFromQueue();
        if (res != null) {
            try {
                processMsg(res);
            } catch (Exception exception) {
                logException(exception, "getNewRequest");
            }
            getNewRequest();
        } else {
            getVertx().setTimer(6000, id -> {
                getNewRequest();
            });
        }
    }
}

This way the RabbitMQ instrumentation will inherit the empty context (Context.root()) instead of the context of the caller of getNewRequest().