openclaw - 💡(How to fix) Fix Feature Request: Add child spans for detailed OTEL traces [1 participants]

TL;DR

Implementing child spans under the openclaw.message.processed span can provide a detailed breakdown of where time is spent during message processing.

Guidance

• Identify significant internal operations such as tool calls, model API latency, tokenization, response building, and other sub-operations that can be wrapped with child spans.
• Use the proposed implementation approach of starting a child span with a specific name (e.g., openclaw.tool.execution) and setting the parent span to openclaw.message.processed.
• Ensure that each child span is properly ended after its corresponding operation is completed to accurately measure the time spent.
• Verify the effectiveness of the child spans by checking the OTLP backend (Jaeger) for the presence and accuracy of the detailed traces.

Example

const parentSpan = tracer.startSpan("openclaw.message.processed");
const toolSpan = tracer.startSpan("openclaw.tool.execution", { parent: parentSpan });
// tool execution code here
toolSpan.end();
const modelApiSpan = tracer.startSpan("openclaw.model.api.latency", { parent: parentSpan });
// model API call code here
modelApiSpan.end();
parentSpan.end();

Notes

The implementation of child spans should be tailored to the specific requirements of the OpenClaw application and may need to be adjusted based on the actual performance characteristics and debugging needs.

Recommendation

Apply the proposed workaround of implementing child spans to gain more detailed insights into the message processing time. This approach allows for a more fine-grained understanding of where time is spent without requiring significant changes to the existing instrumentation.