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All,

Thanks in advance for your time. We are moving to OpenTelemetry from ILogger/log4net logging to files. We were on-prem now moving to the cloud logging to files is not going to work. We use AWS. I have the aws-otel-collector working with tracing. Logging seems to be to console only - there is no way to get logs to xray via OT. In on-prem we made extensive use of file based logging now the auto-instrumentation in OT and AWS does most of what we need. There are times where we all wish we could peek inside the code at runtime and see a few values that the auto instrumentation does not provide. That is what I would like to log to x-ray via OT. There are samples (with warning that say not best practice) that explain how to do this in native AWS but that means I have to run the aws-otel-collector and the x-ray daemon. The use of logs would be very limited and judicious but I would really like to have them covered by one API. Is this possible?

Again - thanks in advance for your time. Steve

steve lomicka
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It looks like you don't differentiate between traces and logs. They are not the same. You can include "logs" (correct term is "event in the span") into trace, but that must be done when traces are generated. If you own the code, then check documentation how to do that.

Opentelemetry (OTEL) is designated for metrics, traces, logs. But implemenetation for logs is still not stable. See https://opentelemetry.io/status/#logging

So I would use OTEL for now only for traces (X-Ray), metrics (AWS Prometheus). Logs should be processed outside of OTEL and stored in correct log storage - that's not X-Ray (that's a trace storage), but OpenSearch, CloudWatch logs, ...

Jan Garaj
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  • Thanks for your reply. What I was looking to do what add some custom information to the trace. Gave up on logging. I tried events but that does not work / is not supported yet either in AWS/OTEL. What I ended up doing was where we need just a little more information was attaching to the current Activity (.net) and add a tag. Activity.Current?.AddTag(kw,value) and this does exactly what we need. We are going to avoid logs all together. Thanks for your help. – steve lomicka Jun 22 '22 at 15:22
  • @stevelomicka it is supported in OTEL. See `current_span.add_event(` lines in https://github.com/jangaraj/cloudformation-example-python-lambda-with-otel/blob/main/cloudformation-example-python-lambda-with-otel.yaml – Jan Garaj Jun 22 '22 at 15:59