Visualization of followsFrom relation

Requirement - what kind of business use case are you trying to solve?

We have multiple arbitration services that are called by multiple other service. All incoming messages are aggregated under certain conditions in a defined time window:

                             +----+
                             |    | Timer
                             v    |
                       +-------+  |
                       |       |  |
                       |   A   +--+
                       |   G   |
 Service A +---------> |   G   |
                       |   R   |    Result
 Service B +---------> |   E   | ------------->
                       |   G   |
 Service C +---------> |   A   |
                       |   T   |
                       |   E   |
                       |       |
                       +-------+

We generate a span for the result with links to the spans from all aggregated requests (OpenTelemetry Links which are exported als Jaeger followsFrom).

Problem - what in Jaeger blocks you from solving the requirement?

At moment, we have a bunch of different independent traces in the Jaeger which is not optimal for tracing the behavior.

Proposal - what do you suggest to solve the problem or improve the existing situation?

We generate a span for the result with links to the spans from all aggregated requests (OpenTelemetry Links which are exported als Jaeger followsFrom). At moment, we have a bunch of different independent traces in the Jaeger, which is quiet suboptiomal.

As the followsFrom links are not visualized yet, we brainstormed what visualization would help us.

1. A link/followsFrom section in the span properties The section should be on the same level as Tags, Process and Logs and should contain HTML links to the spans that a) follows from and b) are followed from this span

2. All linked traced should appear in the same trace view. With different “root nodes” in the Traceview This could be optionally with a “show linked traces” checkbox to enable it.

3. Highlight linked (both ways) span on mouse over/selection events.

Any open questions to address

[cg110]

I’m not sure if this is also the same issue I’m having, if a span is has a Follows_From reference then it gets a link etc to the span it follows from, which is good.

However, that followed span doesn’t seem have any indication that it’s been followed. So if you look at that span there’s nothing to link it to the spans that follows. (I don’t know if this is a backend limitation or UI issue)

It’d be great to have a link so you can find the “followers”, or even better be able to have the multiple traces so the followed and followers can be on one.

In our case we’ve some async calls going on, and we get a callback once complete, in which we know the original span, and we either make that callback be a child (so all on one view) or follow_from the original span. Follow_from feels the right thing, as the callback should be it’s own trace, but it looks better in the ui as a child.

[Sushisource]

Any update on this? I ran into this today and traces that are linked together are pretty much useless because there’s no way to see which spans follow from the span you’re looking at, only backlinks are represented in the UI.

Having a unified view of all spans that followed (ideally transitively as well) from some given span is I would suspect a use case that many, many people would care about.