Opentelemetry > Camel > tracing information lost between incoming and outgoing message (opentelemetry-java-instrumentation)

[ghilainm]

I am using Camel 3.11.0 with Spring boot and opentelemetry-java-instrumentation java agent version 1.3.1 to implement distributed tracing across my microservices.

The trace id is not propagated between the input and output message. A new trace id is created for outgoing messages and therefore correlation is lost.

If you need additional information to investigate don't hesitate to ask.

(see discussion here -> https://camel.zulipchat.com/#narrow/stream/257298-camel/topic/OpenTelemetry.20-.20Trace.20Messages)

Sample project -> https://github.com/ghilainm/camel-spring-boot-showcase

[mateuszrzeszutek]

Camel has its own, official OpenTelemetry integration: https://camel.apache.org/components/latest/others/opentelemetry.html (since 3.5). Have you tried using it?

[ghilainm]

@mateuszrzeszutek No my goal was to have something transparent to the service being instrumented. I don't want to add a dependency to opentelemetry directly :).

[mateuszrzeszutek]

Yeah, that certainly makes sense.
I guess we need a javaagent instrumentation for Camel 3+ then (we could just automatically apply the camel one I suppose).
I'll change the type of this issue to enhancement, since this is about a new instrumentation.

[logamanig]

Do we have any plan to support camel 3.x in near future? Most of the applications now using camel 3.x rather than 2.x and it would be helpful to have built-in support from java-instrumentation to avoid manual instrumentation from the libraries. We are using java-instrumentation and everything works as expected like http tracing, database etc except camel communication.

Since Enterprise Integration Patterns are used by many teams, is it possible to provide higher priority for Camel 3.x implementation please?

[mateuszrzeszutek]

Related issue: #7137

Seems like Camel is actually using the GlobalOpenTelemetry to get a tracer:

            tracer = GlobalOpenTelemetry.get().getTracer(instrumentationName);

so it should be fully compatible with the OpenTelemetry javaagent; that is, if you exclude the context propagation bug linked above.