Emit tracing data (e.g. OpenTelemetry)

[Koenraad]

@bradrydzewski

I think ideally opentelemtry would need to be integrated directly into the core codebase. This is obviously not something we would do without considerable thought and design, which means it would need to go through our formal proposal process before any code is written.

Agree that integrating this into the codebase would be the best solution I don’t mind starting a proposal

@bradrydzewski

The runner cannot receive events from third party systems so this would not be an option. The runners would need to push telemetry data to a central system. If this is not possible with opentelemtry it would probably be a deal breaker at this stage.

This wasn’t super clear in my post but we don’t need to receive events from an external source. The process that is creating the trace data has to be notified about events from Drone itself (i.e. a step has started, a step finished, a step failed,…), it will then generate a span with the metadata available and push this to an external system (your tracing backend of choice).
Drone would need a little bit of user-supplied configuration: the endpoint and headers/api key.