Tracing flow with external systems

[ansip]

Hi,

I would like to have tracing of my business flow which includes an external system (not under my control).

Imagine the situation where I have process A and process B. These are my processes. Process A makes a request to an external system (let's say http request '/submitOrder'), and process B receives some calculated data via a messaging system. For example, there is an Order with an orderId.

So my question is: how can I trace this flow using the OpenTelemetry API?

P.S. I would like to use orderId as the correlation to bind different spans in different processes, but as far as I understand, it is not enough, and you should propagate the whole context (span context) across systems (not only traceId). The problem is that the external system is a vendor product and not under my control. Another issue is that traceId and spanId have the limitation that they must be hex strings, not any string allowed here.

[trask]

hi @ansip! since this question is not Java related, the #opentelemetry slack channel might be a better place to ask