[FEATURE]: Start a new span with no parent

[rhyek]

Package Name

No response

Package Version(s)

5.57.1

Describe the feature you'd like

I have a background worker function polling for data every x seconds inside a while loop and I want the spans created within each iteration to have a clean slate. This is to avoid having 1 parent trace with thousands+ spans for every iteration.

I see tracer.trace and tracer.startSpan both accept a childOf option. TypeScript complains if I try to set this to null, and I believe tracer.trace will inherit the parent span by default. Not sure about startSpan.

What is the best practice here?

Is your feature request related to a problem?

No response

Describe alternatives you've considered

No response

Additional context

No response

[pierreliefauche]

You can omit childOf when calling tracer.startSpan and the created span won't be attached to a parent (which is good to know when you want it attached to a parent, learned that the hard way 😅 )
tracer.trace and tracer.wrap seem to do the plumbing automatically (attach to parent, activate the span)