Trace Formats

Tracing Service supports distributed trace ingestion using the OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP). OTLP is a vendor-neutral format used by OpenTelemetry SDKs, agents, and collectors to export telemetry data.

Note: Tracing Service documentation focuses on OTLP trace ingestion. Metrics and logs use separate observability products and ingestion models.

Supported trace formats

Tracing Service currently accepts traces through the following OTLP transport formats:

Protocol	Endpoint	Note
OTLP/HTTP	https://<tracing-ingestion-endpoint>/v1/traces	Sends traces over HTTP
OTLP/gRPC	grpcs://<tracing-ingestion-endpoint>/v1/traces	Sends traces over gRPC

Trace payload contents

A trace payload can include the following common data structures:

• Traces: A logical end-to-end request or workflow.
• Spans: Individual operations within a trace.
• Resource attributes: Metadata describing the service or workload that emitted the spans, such as service.name.
• Span attributes: Key-value metadata attached to a span.
• Events: Timestamped annotations for notable events during span execution.
• Links: Relationships between spans that are not direct parent-child connections.
• Status: Success or error information attached to a span.