Split and link traces of triggered jobs

[taro-yanagiya]

What feature do you want to see added?

I'm using Build Step inside a job to trigger another Jenkins jobs.
This plugin generates one trace including both triggering job and triggered job.
However, since I would like to focus on one job in most cases, I think those traces should be split.
Instead using Span Link might be more appropriate to link these jobs.

Upstream changes

No response

Are you interested in contributing this feature?

No response

[cyrille-leclerc]

Thanks for your interest in the Jenkins OTel Plugin.
Can you please help us understand your context:

• What do you use pipeline visualization as trace for? Troubleshooting problems? Perfs optimization? Understanding/documentation?...
• What tool do you use to visualize pipelines ads traces?

@kuisathaverat did you ever consider linking upstream & downstream pipeline runs as "span link" rather than as parent/child spans? @christophe-kamphaus-jemmic do you know if the OTel CI/CD SIG put thoughts on this linking?

[christophe-kamphaus-jemmic]

OTel CICD SIG has not yet gotten that far that we think about span links between jobs.
It is an interesting topic that I will put on our backlog.

In general OTel SemConv there have not yet been any conventions for span links defined. There is an open ticket for this: open-telemetry/semantic-conventions#1057

[taro-yanagiya]

@cyrille-leclerc

• I'm trying to use pipeline visualization for analyzing problems.
• I use Grafana for visualization and Clickhouse as database.

In my case, many triggers are used and the traces become huge. Using span links looks more natural because my upstream jobs don't wait for the downstream jobs to complete and the span of the upstream job doesn't surround its downstream job span. But I also understand that the upstream job can wait for the downstream jobs and parent/child spans can be appropriate in this case.