Files
openclaw/extensions/diagnostics-otel
Jesse Merhi f1ee2a3098 fix(diagnostics-otel): agent turns split into one-span traces instead of a trace tree (#116246)
* fix(diagnostics-otel): keep parent span links across long turns

Retained trusted span contexts translate a completed lifecycle span's
diagnostic span id to the real OTel span context. That table was evicted
5s after run.completed, so children of a longer turn missed their parent
and OTel minted a fresh trace id for each one, silently splitting a turn
into single-span traces.

Retention is now identity-based and lives for the service lifetime,
bounded by MAX_RETAINED_TRUSTED_SPAN_CONTEXTS, which removes the timing
race and the drain/timeout cleanup subsystem.

Also nests openclaw.exec under its run: the exec event now carries a
trusted trace context and the recorder resolves the ambient run scope.

* fix(diagnostics-otel): key retained span contexts by diagnostic trace id

Retained lifecycle span contexts were stored under the span's OTel trace id
but looked up with the event's diagnostic trace id. Those are different id
spaces, so every post-completion parent lookup missed and each straggler
span started a brand-new trace.

The mocked suite could not catch this: its tracer reports the same trace id
the test feeds in, collapsing both id spaces into one value. Adds a boundary
test that runs the real OTel SDK and OTLP/protobuf exporter against a local
receiver and asserts on exported span bytes.

* fix(diagnostics-otel): harden span-linking contract after review

Review findings on the parent-span linking fix:

- completeTrackedLifecycleSpan now takes the DiagnosticTraceContext instead of a
  bare trace id beside a span id. Two adjacent hex strings let a transposition
  compile clean and silently reinstate split traces; DiagnosticTraceContext is
  the only shape an OTel SpanContext cannot satisfy (traceFlags string vs number).
- internalOrTrustedTraceContext composes normalizedTrustedTraceContext rather
  than spelling the trust predicate a third time.
- Corrected comments that claimed OTel ids never equal diagnostic ids. Spans
  parented from an upstream traceparent do adopt the diagnostic trace id; the
  removed guard only ever misfired on root lifecycle spans.
- Exec comment now states the real parent: the openclaw harness opens no run
  scope, so exec nests under openclaw.harness.run.

Test gaps closed:

- The core emitter switch was untested; reverting it kept every test green.
  The pty-fallback test now asserts the emitted metadata.
- The boundary test covered only run.completed of three lifecycle owners; it now
  covers harness.run.completed and message.processed too, each with a straggler.
- Dropped the service-context cast for the typed helper, which caught a bogus
  context.assembled field, and moved teardown into afterEach so a failed
  assertion cannot leak the real NodeSDK across files.
- Scoped the one-trace assertion to this turn's spans; faked Date so a lazy
  Date.now expiry cannot pass.

Docs: exec and tool spans now listed as staying on an upstream request trace.

* fix(diagnostics-otel): keep late children on the trace on every terminator

Native review found three correctness gaps in the previous commit:

- Exec spans could be exported naming a parent span id nothing ever emits. The
  ambient lookup fell through to a remote-parent fallback built from diagnostic
  ids, which is a regression from the previous clean-root behavior and breaks
  waterfalls and parent-id-keyed backends. Exec now resolves only spans this
  process exported and stays a root on a miss; message spans keep the remote
  fallback because their context can come from an inbound traceparent.
- harness.run.error never retained its span context, so an aborted turn still
  split. For the openclaw harness that span is the only ancestor a late child
  has, and aborted turns emit no run.completed.
- completeTrackedLifecycleSpan no longer takes a redundant spanId.

The boundary test now runs through the OPENCLAW_OTEL_PRELOADED seam with an
in-memory exporter and releases the global tracer provider in teardown. A
NodeSDK cannot be unregistered, so the old version would have made any later
real-SDK test silently export nothing. That also deletes the hand-rolled OTLP
protobuf decoder. Added guards for the aborted-turn path and for exec staying
parentless; both are mutation-verified.

* fix(diagnostics-otel): age retained parent contexts out after 10 minutes

Retention had no time bound at all, so a command backgrounded by a turn could
finish hours later and still attach to a parent that ended long before. Backends
derive trace latency from the span envelope, so a 30s turn rendered as hours with
a child extending past its parent.

The horizon is checked lazily on lookup rather than on a timer: a timer firing
mid-turn is exactly what silently split traces before. Past the horizon a
straggler starts its own trace, which only loses causality for a span that would
have skewed its parent's duration anyway.

The two bounds now pin each other - shrinking the horizon to the old 5s window
fails the original regression tests, and removing it fails the new horizon test.

* fix(diagnostics-otel): retain parent contexts until capacity
2026-07-30 20:41:41 +10:00
..

@openclaw/diagnostics-otel

Official OpenTelemetry diagnostics exporter for OpenClaw.

This plugin exports OpenClaw Gateway traces, metrics, and logs to an OTLP collector for observability stacks such as Grafana, Datadog, Honeycomb, New Relic, Tempo, and compatible collectors. It can also write diagnostic log records as stdout JSONL for container log pipelines.

Install

openclaw plugins install @openclaw/diagnostics-otel

Restart the Gateway after installing or updating the plugin.

Configure

Enable the plugin and set the OTLP endpoint in plugins.entries.diagnostics-otel.config.

The full config surface, metric names, span names, and collector examples live in the docs:

Package

  • Plugin id: diagnostics-otel
  • Package: @openclaw/diagnostics-otel
  • Minimum OpenClaw host: 2026.4.25