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

One of the promises of distributed tracing is to be able to locate network issues and delays easier.
However, most of the time, network equipments don't create spans.
So right now I don't have a good way of measuring the network time apart from opening the 2 spans and doing "Span Start Time 2" - "Span Start Time 1"

Proposals

Virtual Span option

What do you think of a functionality on the trace visualization that would allow toggling and adding the display of two "virtual spans" in case of inter-service spans?

• one representing the time spent between the start of the parent and the start of the child span (supposedly represents the request time spent on network + tcp/ TLS handshake)
• one representing the time spent between the end of the child and the end of the parent (represents the time of sending the response)

Display the duration of a selection

A cheaper feature would be displaying the duration of a time selection in the upper time view.

Recreate inter-service spans with Kafka

Another way to do it would be with a kafka post-processing that actually creates "real" spans instead.
This would allow easy analytics as well.

Conclusion

Maybe some of this is planned in the UI rework?
I am a backend developer so will have a harder time contributing to this subject but you never know... if we agree on a solution, I could find time to develop this.
Thank you for your time.