Ability to replay/paste trace/spans?

[ddebrunner]

Very nice tool.

I came across otel-desktop-viewer in seeing if I could save a trace or a set of spans in JSON and then visualize it offline.

What otel-desktop-viewer does with its sample data seems to be 90% of the way there, but I would instead like to upload a file or paste a JSON representation of spans.

An alternative would be to just use a replay tool that consumes a JSON file containing the spans and sends to the collector which then could be seen by otel-desktop-viewer. I thought otel-cli might do this, but I'm not seeing any option like that.

So wondering if there were other ideas ...

[jmorrell]

Given that there's a JSON file type in the spec https://opentelemetry.io/docs/specs/otel/protocol/file-exporter/#json-lines-file it might make sense to add that as a feature. That seems fairly new / under development and I wasn't really able to find any tooling around that file format though.

[jmorrell]

Though it looks like the ptrace library might be able to parse that. Honeycomb uses it here https://github.com/honeycombio/otel-file-importer/blob/main/main.go#L133

That should make a CLI tool that replays it quick to build, but it's also something we could try building into this tool after the duckdb migration @CtrlSpice

[ddebrunner]

Thanks @jmorrell for responding, especially the link to the JSON spec which I didn't find.

I was using the file exporter to produce JSON and that seems to be aligned with that spec.
https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-collector-contrib/tree/main/exporter/fileexporter

I think I could always setup another collector that has file importer to read the JSON and then exports to a different collector using http, though that's a bit heavy weight for what I was thinking about. I haven't tried this at all though.

[ddebrunner]

curl to the rescue!

Save the trace in its JSON format and then curl into the collector.

curl -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d @trace.json \
  http://localhost:4318/v1/traces

Thanks to: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/72719361/send-traces-to-opentelemetry-collector