Sorry if this has been asked before but this is a hard topic to search for. Most of the results I got were about applications doing "background tasks" that don't need traced. That is not the case for me.
We have a LOT of apps that do a divide-and-conquer approach to request processing. Example:
- A HTTP request comes in.
- The request is broken down into some sub-components.
- Multiple Threads are started, 1 per sub-component.
- We wait for all the sub-requests to return.
- Assemble a final response from all the sub-requests and return it.
We'd like to have distributed tracing properly group all the sub-requests into a single trace so Davis can properly root-cause issues with the sub-requests. Right now, we're in a state where the parent request can experience a "problem" and that is all the information we get. The actual issue is in one of the sub-requests but we can't drill down into it.
With OpenTracing/Zipkin, this is a super easy problem to solve. We can just propagate the trace context to the sub-thread and all is well. With Dynatrace, I can't seem to find how to do that propagation with the trace context automatically created by Dynatrace.
So, my ask is: how can I manually propagate the automatically created trace context to a child thread without re-inventing tracing using OpenTracing?
