@opentelemetry/propagator-grpc-census-binary NPM

OpenTelemetry Propagator gRPC Census

OpenTelemetry gRPC Census propagator provides gRPC header propagation for systems that use the OpenCensus 'grpc-trace-bin' binary header format. This allows for context propagation when either:

incoming gRPC calls come from services already instrumented using OpenCensus
outgoing gRPC calls go to services already instrumented using OpenCensus

This propagator works in conjunction with the OpenTelemetry gRPC plugin.

Example of usage:

const { NodeTracerProvider } = require('@opentelemetry/sdk-trace-node');
const { GrpcCensusPropagator } = require('@opentelemetry/propagator-grpc-census-binary');
const { registerInstrumentations } = require('@opentelemetry/instrumentation');
const { GrpcInstrumentation } = require('opentelemetry/instrumentation-grpc');

const provider = new NodeTracerProvider();

// Register GrpcCensusPropagator so we can propagate content using
// the 'grpc-trace-bin' header in our incoming/outgoing gRPC calls.
provider.register({
  propagator: new GrpcCensusPropagator()
});

registerInstrumentations({
  instrumentations: [
    new GrpcInstrumentation(),
  ],
});

Also, see examples/grpc-census-prop for a worked example that shows when this propagator can be useful.

Implementation Details

See binary-format.ts for equivalent encoding/decoding of the format in OpenCensus. Note: the author of the OpenCensus binary format, @mayurkale22, also created BinaryTraceContext.ts in opentelemetry-core but that was subsequently removed as part of PR #804. The implementation of GrpcCensusPropagator in this module uses a version of BinaryTraceContext.ts inspired by Mayur's previous work (with minor modifications e.g. there is no longer a BinaryFormat interface to implement).