Semantic Conventions for Messaging Spans

Status: Experimental

Warning Existing messaging instrumentations that are using v1.24.0 of this document (or prior) SHOULD NOT change the version of the messaging conventions that they emit by default until a transition plan to the (future) stable semantic conventions has been published. Conventions include, but are not limited to, attributes, metric and span names, and unit of measure.

Definitions

Message

Although messaging systems are not as standardized as, e.g., HTTP, it is assumed that the following definitions are applicable to most of them that have similar concepts at all (names borrowed mostly from JMS):

A message is an envelope with a potentially empty body. This envelope may offer the possibility to convey additional metadata, often in key/value form.

A message is sent by a message producer to:

• Physically: some message broker (which can be e.g., a single server, or a cluster, or a local process reached via IPC). The broker handles the actual delivery, re-delivery, persistence, etc. In some messaging systems the broker may be identical or co-located with (some) message consumers. With Apache Kafka, the physical broker a message is written to depends on the number of partitions, and which broker is the leader of the partition the record is written to.
• Logically: some particular message destination.

Messages can be delivered to 0, 1, or multiple consumers depending on the dispatching semantic of the protocol.

Producer

The “producer” is a specific instance, process or device that creates and sends a message. “Sending” is the process of transmitting a message or batch of messages to the intermediary or consumer. Some intermediaries use “publishing” as a synonym to sending.

Consumer

A “consumer” receives the message and acts upon it. It uses the context and data to execute some logic, which might lead to the occurrence of new events.

The consumer receives, processes, and settles a message. “Receiving” is the process of obtaining a message from the intermediary, “processing” is the process of acting on the information a message contains, “settling” is the process of notifying an intermediary that a message was processed successfully.

Intermediary

An “intermediary” receives a message to forward it to the next receiver, which might be another intermediary or a consumer.

Destinations

A destination represents the entity within a messaging system where messages are sent to and consumed from.

A destination is usually uniquely identified by its name within the messaging system instance. Examples of a destination name would be an URL or a simple one-word identifier.

Typical examples of destinations include Kafka topics, RabbitMQ queues and topics.

Message consumption

The consumption of a message can happen in multiple steps. First, the lower-level receiving of a message at a consumer, and then the logical processing of the message. Often, the waiting for a message is not particularly interesting and hidden away in a framework that only invokes some handler function to process a message once one is received (in the same way that the listening on a TCP port for an incoming HTTP message is not particularly interesting).

Consumer groups

Consumer groups provide a logical grouping for the message consumers. Messaging systems use them to load balance message consumption within the group, broadcast messages to multiple types of the consumers, manage offset for each group independently. As a result, different groups of consumers can receive messages at a different pace or using different settings.

Subscriptions

Subscriptions represent entities within messaging systems that allow multiple consumers to receive messages from the topic following subscription-specific consumption behavior that includes load balancing, durability, filtering, or other system-specific capabilities.

Named subscriptions and consumers groups are semantically different mechanisms messaging systems use for similar scenarios such as load-balancing or broadcasting.

Conversations

In some messaging systems, a message can receive one or more reply messages that answers a particular other message that was sent earlier. All messages that are grouped together by such a reply-relationship are called a conversation. The grouping usually happens through some sort of “In-Reply-To:” meta information or an explicit conversation ID (sometimes called correlation ID). Sometimes a conversation can span multiple message destinations (e.g. initiated via a topic, continued on a temporary one-to-one queue).

Temporary and anonymous destinations

Some messaging systems support the concept of temporary destination (often only temporary queues) that are established just for a particular set of communication partners (often one to one) or conversation. Often such destinations are also unnamed (anonymous) or have an auto-generated name.

Conventions

Given these definitions, the remainder of this section describes the semantic conventions for Spans describing interactions with messaging systems.

Context propagation

A message may traverse many different components and layers in one or more intermediaries when it is propagated from the producer to the consumer(s). To be able to correlate consumer traces with producer traces using the existing context propagation mechanisms, all components must propagate context down the chain.

Messaging systems themselves may trace messages as the messages travels from producers to consumers. Such tracing would cover the transport layer but would not help in correlating producers with consumers. To be able to directly correlate producers with consumers, another context that is propagated with the message is required.

A message creation context allows correlating producers with consumers of a message and model the dependencies between them, regardless of the underlying messaging transport mechanism and its instrumentation.

The message creation context is created by the producer and should be propagated to the consumer(s). Consumer traces cannot be directly correlated with producer traces if the message creation context is not attached and propagated with the message.

A producer SHOULD attach a message creation context to each message. If possible, the message creation context SHOULD be attached in such a way that it cannot be changed by intermediaries.

This document does not specify the exact mechanisms on how the creation context is attached/extracted to/from messages. Future versions of these conventions will give clear recommendations, following industry standards including, but not limited to Trace Context: AMQP protocol and Trace Context: MQTT protocol once those standards reach a stable state.

Span name

Messaging spans SHOULD follow the overall guidelines for span names.

The span name SHOULD be {messaging.operation.name} {destination} (see below for the exact definition of the {destination} placeholder).

Semantic conventions for individual messaging systems MAY specify different span name format and then MUST document it in semantic conventions for specific messaging technologies.

The {destination} SHOULD describe the entity that the operation is performed against and SHOULD adhere to one of the following values, provided they are accessible:

1. messaging.destination.template SHOULD be used when it is available.
2. messaging.destination.name SHOULD be used when the destination is known to be neither temporary nor anonymous.
3. server.address:server.port SHOULD be used only for operations not targeting any specific destination(s).

If a corresponding {destination} value is not available for a specific operation, the instrumentation SHOULD omit the {destination}.

Examples:

• publish shop.orders
• send shop.orders
• subscribe shop.orders
• ack shop.orders
• nack print_jobs
• process topic with spaces
• settle AuthenticationRequest-Conversations

Operation types

The following operation types related to messages are defined for these semantic conventions:

Span kind

Span kind SHOULD be set according to the following table, based on the operation type a span describes.

Setting span kinds according to this table allows analysis tools to interpret spans and relationships between them without the need for additional semantic hints.

Trace structure

Producer spans

“Create” spans MAY be created when a message is created or passed to the client library or other component responsible for sending. A single “Create” span SHOULD account only for a single message. “Send” spans SHOULD be created for operations of sending or publishing a message to an intermediary. A single “Send” span can account for a single message, or for multiple messages (in the case of sending messages in batches).

If a user provides a custom creation context in a message, this context SHOULD NOT be modified and a “Create” span SHOULD NOT be created. Otherwise, if a “Create” span exists for a message, its context SHOULD be injected into the message. If no “Create” span exists and no custom creation context is injected into the message, the context of the related “Send” span SHOULD be injected into the message.

The “Send” span SHOULD always link to the creation context that was injected into a message either from a “Create” span or as a custom creation context.

When instrumenting a library API that always sends a single message, it is RECOMMENDED to create “Publish” span without “Create” span.

When instrumenting a library API that usually operate with batches, it is RECOMMENDED to create a “Create” span for each message along with the “Publish” span. It is also RECOMMENDED to provide a configuration option allowing to disable “Create” span creation.

Consumer spans

“Receive” spans SHOULD be created for operations of passing messages to the application when those operations are initiated by the application code (pull-based scenarios).

“Process” spans SHOULD be created for operations of passing messages to the application when those operations are not initiated by the application code (push-based scenarios). Such “Process” span covers the duration of such an operation, which is usually a callback or handler.

“Process” spans MAY be created in addition to “Receive” spans for pull-based scenarios for operations of processing messages. Such spans could be created by application code, or by abstraction layers built on top of messaging SDKs.

“Receive” or “Process” spans MUST NOT be created for messages that are pre-fetched or cached by messaging libraries or SDKs until they are forwarded to the caller.

A single “Process” or “Receive” span can account for a single message, for a batch of messages, or for no message at all (if it is signalled that no messages were received). For each message it accounts for, the “Process” or “Receive” span SHOULD link to the message’s creation context.

[!IMPORTANT] These conventions use spans links as the default mechanism to correlate producers and consumer(s) because:

• It is the only consistent trace structure that can be guaranteed, given the many different messaging systems models available.

• It is the only option to correlate producer and consumer(s) in batch scenarios as a span can only have a single parent.

• It is the only option to correlate producer and consumer(s) when message consumption can happen in the scope of another ambient context such as a HTTP server span.

“Settle” spans SHOULD be created for every manually or automatically triggered settlement operation. A single “Settle” span can account for a single message or for multiple messages (in case messages are passed for settling as batches). For each message it accounts for, the “Settle” span MAY link to the creation context of the message.

Message creation context as parent of “Process” span

Exclusively for single messages scenarios, the “Process” span MAY use the message’s creation context as its parent, thus achieving a direct parent-child relationship between producer and consumer(s). Instrumentations SHOULD document whether they use the message creation context as a parent for “Process” spans and MAY provide configuration options allowing users to control this behavior.

It is NOT RECOMMENDED to use the message creation context as the parent of “Process” spans (by default) if processing happens in the scope of another span.

If instrumentation uses the message creation context as the parent for “Process” spans in the scope of another valid ambient context, it SHOULD add the ambient context as a link on the “Process” span to preserve the correlation between message processing and that context.

For example, a messaging broker pushes messages over HTTP to a consumer application which has HTTP server and messaging instrumentations enabled.

The messaging instrumentation would create the “Process” span following one of these possible approaches:

• “Process” span is a child of the HTTP server span context and has a link to the message creation context. This is the default behavior.

• “Process” span is a child of the message creation context and has two links: one to the message creation context and another one to HTTP server span context. This is an opt-in behavior.

Messaging attributes

Messaging attributes are organized into the following namespaces:

• messaging.message: Contains attributes that describe individual messages.
• messaging.destination: Contains attributes that describe the logical entity messages are sent to. See Destinations for more details.
• messaging.batch: Contains attributes that describe batch operations.
• messaging.consumer: Contains attributes that describe the application instance that consumes a message. See Consumer for more details.

Messaging system-specific attributes MUST be defined in the corresponding messaging.{system} namespace.

Attribute	Type	Description	Examples	Requirement Level	Stability
messaging.operation.name	string	The system-specific name of the messaging operation.	ack; nack; send	Required
messaging.system	string	The messaging system as identified by the client instrumentation. [1]	activemq; aws_sqs; eventgrid	Required
error.type	string	Describes a class of error the operation ended with. [2]	amqp:decode-error; KAFKA_STORAGE_ERROR; channel-error	Conditionally Required If and only if the messaging operation has failed.
messaging.batch.message_count	int	The number of messages sent, received, or processed in the scope of the batching operation. [3]	0; 1; 2	Conditionally Required [4]
messaging.consumer.group.name	string	The name of the consumer group with which a consumer is associated. [5]	my-group; indexer	Conditionally Required If applicable.
messaging.destination.anonymous	boolean	A boolean that is true if the message destination is anonymous (could be unnamed or have auto-generated name).		Conditionally Required [6]
messaging.destination.name	string	The message destination name [7]	MyQueue; MyTopic	Conditionally Required [8]
messaging.destination.subscription.name	string	The name of the destination subscription from which a message is consumed. [9]	subscription-a	Conditionally Required If applicable.
messaging.destination.template	string	Low cardinality representation of the messaging destination name [10]	/customers/{customerId}	Conditionally Required [11]
messaging.destination.temporary	boolean	A boolean that is true if the message destination is temporary and might not exist anymore after messages are processed.		Conditionally Required [12]
messaging.operation.type	string	A string identifying the type of the messaging operation. [13]	send; create; receive	Conditionally Required If applicable.
server.address	string	Server domain name if available without reverse DNS lookup; otherwise, IP address or Unix domain socket name. [14]	example.com; 10.1.2.80; /tmp/my.sock	Conditionally Required If available.
messaging.client.id	string	A unique identifier for the client that consumes or produces a message.	client-5; myhost@8742@s8083jm	Recommended
messaging.destination.partition.id	string	The identifier of the partition messages are sent to or received from, unique within the messaging.destination.name.	1	Recommended When applicable.
messaging.message.conversation_id	string	The conversation ID identifying the conversation to which the message belongs, represented as a string. Sometimes called “Correlation ID”.	MyConversationId	Recommended
messaging.message.id	string	A value used by the messaging system as an identifier for the message, represented as a string.	452a7c7c7c7048c2f887f61572b18fc2	Recommended If span describes operation on a single message.
network.peer.address	string	Peer address of the messaging intermediary node where the operation was performed. [15]	10.1.2.80; /tmp/my.sock	Recommended If applicable for this messaging system.
network.peer.port	int	Peer port of the messaging intermediary node where the operation was performed.	65123	Recommended if and only if network.peer.address is set.
server.port	int	Server port number. [16]	80; 8080; 443	Recommended
messaging.message.body.size	int	The size of the message body in bytes. [17]	1439	Opt-In
messaging.message.envelope.size	int	The size of the message body and metadata in bytes. [18]	2738	Opt-In

[1]: The actual messaging system may differ from the one known by the client. For example, when using Kafka client libraries to communicate with Azure Event Hubs, the messaging.system is set to kafka based on the instrumentation’s best knowledge.

[2]: The error.type SHOULD be predictable, and SHOULD have low cardinality.

When error.type is set to a type (e.g., an exception type), its canonical class name identifying the type within the artifact SHOULD be used.

Instrumentations SHOULD document the list of errors they report.

The cardinality of error.type within one instrumentation library SHOULD be low. Telemetry consumers that aggregate data from multiple instrumentation libraries and applications should be prepared for error.type to have high cardinality at query time when no additional filters are applied.

If the operation has completed successfully, instrumentations SHOULD NOT set error.type.

If a specific domain defines its own set of error identifiers (such as HTTP or gRPC status codes), it’s RECOMMENDED to:

• Use a domain-specific attribute
• Set error.type to capture all errors, regardless of whether they are defined within the domain-specific set or not.

[3]: Instrumentations SHOULD NOT set messaging.batch.message_count on spans that operate with a single message. When a messaging client library supports both batch and single-message API for the same operation, instrumentations SHOULD use messaging.batch.message_count for batching APIs and SHOULD NOT use it for single-message APIs.

[4]: If the span describes an operation on a batch of messages.

[5]: Semantic conventions for individual messaging systems SHOULD document whether messaging.consumer.group.name is applicable and what it means in the context of that system.

[6]: If value is true. When missing, the value is assumed to be false.

[7]: Destination name SHOULD uniquely identify a specific queue, topic or other entity within the broker. If the broker doesn’t have such notion, the destination name SHOULD uniquely identify the broker.

[8]: If span describes operation on a single message or if the value applies to all messages in the batch.

[9]: Semantic conventions for individual messaging systems SHOULD document whether messaging.destination.subscription.name is applicable and what it means in the context of that system.

[10]: Destination names could be constructed from templates. An example would be a destination name involving a user name or product id. Although the destination name in this case is of high cardinality, the underlying template is of low cardinality and can be effectively used for grouping and aggregation.

[11]: If available. Instrumentations MUST NOT use messaging.destination.name as template unless low-cardinality of destination name is guaranteed.

[12]: If value is true. When missing, the value is assumed to be false.

[13]: If a custom value is used, it MUST be of low cardinality.

[14]: Server domain name of the broker if available without reverse DNS lookup; otherwise, IP address or Unix domain socket name.

[15]: Semantic conventions for individual messaging systems SHOULD document whether network.peer.* attributes are applicable. Network peer address and port are important when the application interacts with individual intermediary nodes directly, If a messaging operation involved multiple network calls (for example retries), the address of the last contacted node SHOULD be used.

[16]: When observed from the client side, and when communicating through an intermediary, server.port SHOULD represent the server port behind any intermediaries, for example proxies, if it’s available.

[17]: This can refer to both the compressed or uncompressed body size. If both sizes are known, the uncompressed body size should be used.

[18]: This can refer to both the compressed or uncompressed size. If both sizes are known, the uncompressed size should be used.

The following attributes can be important for making sampling decisions and SHOULD be provided at span creation time (if provided at all):

• messaging.consumer.group.name
• messaging.destination.name
• messaging.destination.partition.id
• messaging.destination.subscription.name
• messaging.destination.template
• messaging.operation.name
• messaging.operation.type
• messaging.system
• server.address
• server.port

error.type has the following list of well-known values. If one of them applies, then the respective value MUST be used; otherwise, a custom value MAY be used.

Value	Description	Stability
_OTHER	A fallback error value to be used when the instrumentation doesn’t define a custom value.

messaging.operation.type has the following list of well-known values. If one of them applies, then the respective value MUST be used; otherwise, a custom value MAY be used.

Value	Description	Stability
create	A message is created. “Create” spans always refer to a single message and are used to provide a unique creation context for messages in batch sending scenarios.
process	One or more messages are processed by a consumer.
receive	One or more messages are requested by a consumer. This operation refers to pull-based scenarios, where consumers explicitly call methods of messaging SDKs to receive messages.
send	One or more messages are provided for sending to an intermediary. If a single message is sent, the context of the “Send” span can be used as the creation context and no “Create” span needs to be created.
settle	One or more messages are settled.

messaging.system has the following list of well-known values. If one of them applies, then the respective value MUST be used; otherwise, a custom value MAY be used.

Value	Description	Stability
activemq	Apache ActiveMQ
aws_sqs	Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS)
eventgrid	Azure Event Grid
eventhubs	Azure Event Hubs
gcp_pubsub	Google Cloud Pub/Sub
jms	Java Message Service
kafka	Apache Kafka
pulsar	Apache Pulsar
rabbitmq	RabbitMQ
rocketmq	Apache RocketMQ
servicebus	Azure Service Bus

Recording per-message attributes on batch operations

All messaging operations (send, receive, process, or others not covered by this specification) can describe both single and/or batch of messages. Attributes in the messaging.message or messaging.{system}.message namespace apply to individual messages and typically vary between messages within the same batch.

Some messaging systems such as Kafka or Azure Event Grid allow sending a batch of messages to different topics in a single operation, resulting in different messaging.destination.name or other destination attributes within a single messaging operation.

If the attribute value is the same for all messages in the batch, the instrumentation SHOULD set such attribute on the span representing the batch operation. If the attribute values vary, the instrumentation SHOULD set such attributes on links describing individual messages.

See Batch receiving for more information on correlation using links.

Examples

This section contains a list of examples illustrating the use of the conventions outlined above. Green boxes denote spans that are required to exist in order to conform to those conventions. Other boxes denote spans that are not required and covered by the conventions, but are hopefully helpful in understanding how messaging spans can be integrated into an overall trace flow. Solid arrows denote parent/child relationships, dotted arrows denote link relationships.

Topic with multiple consumers

Given is a publisher that publishes a message to a topic exchange “T” on RabbitMQ, and two consumers which both get the message delivered.

flowchart LR;
  subgraph PRODUCER
  direction TB
  P[Span Send A]
  end
  subgraph CONSUMER1
  direction TB
  R1[Span Process A 1]
  end
  subgraph CONSUMER2
  direction TB
  R2[Span Process A 2]
  end
  P-. link .-R1;
  P-- parent -->R1;
  P-. link .-R2;
  P-- parent -->R2;

  classDef normal fill:green
  class P,R1,R2 normal
  linkStyle 0,1,2,3 color:green,stroke:green

Batch receiving

Given is a producer that publishes two messages to a topic “Q” on Kafka, and a consumer which receives both messages in one batch.

flowchart LR;
  subgraph PRODUCER
  direction TB
  PA[Span Send A]
  PB[Span Send B]
  end
  subgraph CONSUMER1
  direction TB
  D1[Span Receive A B]
  end
  PA-. link .-D1;
  PB-. link .-D1;

  classDef normal fill:green
  class PA,PB,D1 normal
  linkStyle 0,1 color:green,stroke:green

Batch publishing with “Create” spans

Given is a producer that publishes a batch with two messages to a topic “Q” on Kafka, and two different consumers receiving one of the messages.

Instrumentation in this case reports “Create” span for each message and a “Publish” span that’s linked to a “Create” span.

flowchart LR;
  subgraph PRODUCER
  direction TB
  CA[Span Create A]
  CB[Span Create B]
  P[Span Send]
  end
  subgraph CONSUMER1
  direction TB
  D1[Span Receive A]
  end
  subgraph CONSUMER2
  direction TB
  D2[Span Receive B]
  end
  CA-. link .-P;
  CB-. link .-P;
  CA-. link .-D1;
  CB-. link .-D2;

  classDef normal fill:green
  class P,CA,CB,D1,D2 normal
  linkStyle 0,1,2,3 color:green,stroke:green

Batch publishing without “Create” spans

Given is a publisher that publishes a batch with two messages to a topic “Q” on Kafka, and two different consumers receiving one of the messages.

Based on the configuration provided by user, instrumentation in this case reports “Publish” span only. It injects “Publish” span context into both messages.

flowchart LR;
  subgraph PRODUCER
  direction TB
  P[Span Publish]
  end
  subgraph CONSUMER1
  direction TB
  D1[Span Receive A]
  end
  subgraph CONSUMER2
  direction TB
  D2[Span Receive B]
  end
  P-. link .-D1;
  P-. link .-D2;

  classDef normal fill:green
  class P,D1,D2 normal
  linkStyle 0,1 color:green,stroke:green