Spans and Traces by hand

[NameOfTheDragon]

Is it feasible to create spans and/or traces without having to use OpenTelemetry? I have a number of products that use NLog as the back end, but I do have an abstraction over the top of it. I was wondering if there's a way to add thsi capability to my NLog abstraction and create the spans and traces manually?

[KodrAus]

Hi @NameOfTheDragon 👋

If you have control over the JSON payloads produced then you certainly can construct span events yourself. We've got some docs on the properties you need to include here. Basically, you need to add the following properties to your events:

• @st: The start time of the span in the same format as @t
• @tr: The trace id as a 32 char hex string
• @sp: The span id as a 16 char hex string

You can also add extra properties in @sc and @ra, but these are optional from Seq's point of view.

As for manually constructing spans, you can do this using the System.Diagnostics.Activity APIs yourself. Even if you don't use the project directly, you might find some inspiration from how we do this in SerilogTracing.

Hope that helps!