Continuing tracing with other systems

On this page

  1. Accepting a trace from another system to your Laravel app
  2. Sending trace information from your Laravel app to another system

Using open telemetry, a trace can start and stop on different systems. The package is able to handle this.

If your Laravel app is used in a bigger system, where one of the other apps started a trace, your Laravel app might get called by that other apps with a traceparent header. This header contains the id of trace that was started.

To have all measurements you take use that trace id from the header, you can use the ContinueTrace middleware. This middleware will look for incoming requests that have a traceparent header and use the given trace id.

To use the ContinueTrace middleware, register it in your HTTP kernel.

namespace App\Http\Middleware;

use Spatie\OpenTelemetry\Http\Middleware\ContinueTrace;

class Kernel extends HttpKernel
{
    protected $middleware = [
        ContinueTrace::class,
        
        // other middleware
    ];
}

If your Laravel app calls other system using Laravel's built-in Http client, you can call the withTrace method. This will add a traceparent header containing the trace and span ids.

use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Http;

Http::withTrace()->post('https://example.com');