Invalid timings sent by instrumentations (xhr,fetch,resource)

[Abinet18]

When browser navigation or resource timing apis don't set a certain timing value or report it as 0 (e.g connectionStart, responseStart,...) the spans generated by instrumentations like like xhr/fetch/resource report a value that is lower than fetchStart ( timeOrigin ) , which can result in wrong metrics by backend. Can we avoid reporting this invalid timings by either checking if their value is above 0, or above a certain reference time like fetchStart

Here is a sample payload from xhr with such issues, It is a failed xhr request and the values from domainLookupStart up to responseEnd show a lower value than fetchStart. Similar issue can happen to cached requests, or aborted requests too.

events: [
{
"attributes": [],
"name": "open",
"timeUnixNano": "1707848692048000000",
"droppedAttributesCount": 0
},
{
"attributes": [],
"name": "send",
"timeUnixNano": "1707848692048200000",
"droppedAttributesCount": 0
},
{
"attributes": [],
"name": "fetchStart",
"timeUnixNano": "1707848692048699951",
"droppedAttributesCount": 0
},
{
"attributes": [],
"name": "domainLookupStart",
"timeUnixNano": "1707848675667199951",
"droppedAttributesCount": 0
},
{
"attributes": [],
"name": "domainLookupEnd",
"timeUnixNano": "1707848675667199951",
"droppedAttributesCount": 0
},
{
"attributes": [],
"name": "connectStart",
"timeUnixNano": "1707848675667199951",
"droppedAttributesCount": 0
},
{
"attributes": [],
"name": "connectEnd",
"timeUnixNano": "1707848675667199951",
"droppedAttributesCount": 0
},
{
"attributes": [],
"name": "requestStart",
"timeUnixNano": "1707848675667199951",
"droppedAttributesCount": 0
},
{
"attributes": [],
"name": "responseStart",
"timeUnixNano": "1707848675667199951",
"droppedAttributesCount": 0
},
{
"attributes": [],
"name": "responseEnd",
"timeUnixNano": "1707848692057099951",
"droppedAttributesCount": 0
},
{
"attributes": [],
"name": "error",
"timeUnixNano": "1707848692058000000",
"droppedAttributesCount": 0
}
]

Here is how the events are added to spans,

opentelemetry-js/packages/opentelemetry-sdk-trace-web/src/utils.ts

Line 60 in 44b0b29

export function addSpanNetworkEvent(

[Abinet18]

@martinkuba , @MSNev , @scheler , @t2t2 , can you take a loot at this issue ?

[dyladan]

I think we can add logic to check that these values are sane, but some of them have 0 as a valid value.