Continue tracing on NodeJS a span started with Sleuth - B3 on Spring Boot

[yanosh1982]

I'm developing a microservices based application with three services:

• Orchestrator service
• Service A
• Service B

The Orchestrator service is a Spring Boot application that traces requests with Sleuth / B3. Here an example log entry:

2023-09-19 16:52:49.401 DEBUG [orchestrator,6ddce8f8b325a9b9,6ddce8f8b325a9b9] 30743 --- [nio-8080-exec-8] org.hibernate.SQL

The three microservices communicate through a Kafka Broker so at the end of the request processing the Orchestrator service put a message in a Kafka topic sending the following headers (including the B3 headers):

{
	"X-B3-SpanId": "582942e743b9446f",
	"X-B3-TraceId": "582942e743b9446f",
	"id": "9"
}

The receiving service is a NestJS service that uses OpenTelemetry with a B3 propagator to intercept the B3 headers from the Kafka message. Now i would like to continue the tracing of the TraceId and SpanId created with Sleuth but I can't figure out how to do it. This is how I have configured Open Telemetry on the NestJS service:

tracer.js

import {
    ConsoleSpanExporter,
    SimpleSpanProcessor,
  } from '@opentelemetry/sdk-trace-base';
  import { api, NodeSDK } from '@opentelemetry/sdk-node';
  import * as process from 'process';
  import { getNodeAutoInstrumentations } from '@opentelemetry/auto-instrumentations-node';
  import {Resource} from '@opentelemetry/resources';
  import { SemanticResourceAttributes } from '@opentelemetry/semantic-conventions';
  import { B3Propagator, B3InjectEncoding } from '@opentelemetry/propagator-b3';
  const { NodeTracerProvider } = require('@opentelemetry/sdk-trace-node');
  const { KafkaJsInstrumentation } = require('opentelemetry-instrumentation-kafkajs');

  
  const traceExporter = new ConsoleSpanExporter();
  
  api.propagation.setGlobalPropagator(new B3Propagator({ injectEncoding: B3InjectEncoding.MULTI_HEADER }));

  export const otelSDK = new NodeSDK({
    spanProcessor: new SimpleSpanProcessor(traceExporter),
    instrumentations: [
        getNodeAutoInstrumentations(),
        new KafkaJsInstrumentation({
            // see under for available configuration
        })
    ],
    resource: new Resource({
        [SemanticResourceAttributes.SERVICE_NAME]: `ipfs-service`,
    }),
  });
  
  // gracefully shut down the SDK on process exit
  process.on('SIGTERM', () => {
    otelSDK
      .shutdown()
      .then(
        () => console.log('SDK shut down successfully'),
        (err) => console.log('Error shutting down SDK', err),
      )
      .finally(() => process.exit(0));
  });

main.ts

import { NestFactory } from '@nestjs/core';
import { AppModule } from './app.module';
import { MicroserviceOptions, Transport } from '@nestjs/microservices';
import { otelSDK } from './tracer';

async function bootstrap() {

  otelSDK.start();

  const app = await NestFactory.createMicroservice<MicroserviceOptions>(AppModule, {
    transport: Transport.KAFKA,
    options: {
      client: {
        clientId: 'ipfs-client',
        brokers: ['localhost:29092'],
      },
      subscribe: {
        fromBeginning: true
      },
      consumer: {
        groupId: 'ipfs-consumer'
      }
    }
  });
  app.listen();
}
bootstrap();

and this is what the NestJS microservice logs:

{
  traceId: '48f139a5b81cd0bf60748321310047d2',
  parentId: undefined,
  traceState: undefined,
  name: 'IPFS',
  id: '353136b7af6bcc2d',
  kind: 4,
  timestamp: 1695137391490000,
  duration: 2493.083,
  attributes: {
    'messaging.system': 'kafka',
    'messaging.destination': 'IPFS',
    'messaging.destination_kind': 'topic',
    'messaging.operation': 'process'
  },
  status: { code: 0 },
  events: [],
  links: []
}

as you can see the trace id is different from the original created by Sleuth.

Thanks in advace.

[yanosh1982]

Can you please give me any clarification? I'm new to this kind of problems so I apologize if the question sounds strange