Manual Spans

Add custom spans around business operations.

spans

Detailed Description

Manual spans add business meaning that auto-instrumentation cannot know. They let you name operations like placeOrder, calculatePrice, reserveInventory, or sendInvoice.

Add attributes carefully: include IDs and categories that help debugging, but avoid secrets, large payloads, and high-cardinality values that make tracing expensive.

Mental Model

start span
-> do work
-> add attributes
-> end span

When To Use

->Auto-instrumentation is too generic
->You need domain-specific span names
->You want to mark cache hits, user IDs, or job names

Tools: trace.getTracer, span attributes, error recording

manual-span.js

Live Editor

Output

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