Telepoison

Telepoison is a opentelemetry-instrumented wrapper around HTTPoison.

Usage

Replace usages of the HTTPoison module with Telepoison when calling one of the derived request functions provided by HTTPoison (HTTPoison.get/3, HTTPoison.get!/3 etc.)

# Before
HTTPoison.get!(url, headers, opts)

# After
Telepoison.get!(url, headers, opts)

Configuration

Telepoison can be configured through config :telepoison. The configurable options are:

• :ot_attributes: what default Open Telemetry metadata attributes will be sent per request

  If no value is provided, then no default Open Telemetry metadata attributes will sent per request by default

  If a list of two element tuples (both elements of String.t()) is provided, then these will form the default Open Telemetry metadata attributes sent per request

  The first element of a provided tuple is the attribute name, e.g. service.name, whilst the second element is the attribute value, e.g. “shoppingcart”

• :infer_route: how the http.route Open Telemetry metadata will be set per request

  If no value is provided then the out of the box, conservative inference provided by Telepoison.URI.infer_route_from_request/1 is used to determine the inference

  If a function with an arity of 1 (the argument given being the t:HTTPoison.Request/0request) is provided then that function is used to determine the inference

Both of these can be overridden per each call to Telepoison functions that wrap Telepoison.request/1, such as Telepoison.get/3, Telepoison.get!/3, Telepoison.post/3 etc.

See here for examples

Open Telemetry integration

Additionally, Telepoison provides some options that can be added to each derived function via the Keyword listopts parameter (or the t:HTTPoison.Request/0Keyword listoptions parameter if calling Telepoison.Request/1 directly). These are prefixed with :ot_.

• :ot_span_name - sets the span name.
• :ot_attributes - a list of {name, value}tuple attributes that will be added to the span.
• :ot_resource_route - sets the http.route attribute, depending on the value provided.

If the value is a string or an function with an arity of 1 (the t:HTTPoison.Request/0request) that is used to set the attribute

If :infer is provided, then the function discussed within the Configuration section is used to set the attribute

If the atom :ignore is provided then the http.route attribute is ignored entirely

It is highly recommended to supply the :ot_resource_route explicitly as either a string or a function with an arity of 1 (the t:HTTPoison.Request/0request)

Examples

In the below examples, Telepoison.get!/3 is used for the sake of simplicity but other functions derived from Telepoison.request/1 can be used

config :telepoison,
  ot_attributes: [{"service.name", "users"}]

Telepoison.get!(
  "https://www.example.com/user/list",
  [],
  ot_span_name: "list example users",
  ot_attributes: [{"example.language", "en"}],
  ot_resource_route: :infer
)

In the example above:

• Telepoison is configured with {"service.name", "users"} as the value for the :ot_attributes option
• :infer is passed as the value for the :ot_resource_routeKeyword list option

Given the above, the service.name attribute will be set to “users” and the http.route attribute will be inferred as /user/:subpath

Telepoison.get!(
  "https://www.example.com/user/list",
  [],
  ot_span_name: "list example users",
  ot_attributes: [{"example.language", "en"}],
  ot_resource_route: :infer
)

In the example above:

• :infer is passed as the value for :ot_resource_routeKeyword list option

Given the above, the http.route attribute will be inferred as /user/:subpath

config :telepoison,
  infer_route: fn 
    %HTTPoison.Request{} = request -> URI.parse(request.url).path
  end

Telepoison.get!(
  "https://www.example.com/user/list",
  [],
  ot_resource_route: :infer
)

In the example above:

• Telepoison is configured with the :infer_route option set to a function which takes a %HTTPoison.Request/0 argument, returning the path of the request URL
• :infer is passed as the value for :ot_resource_routeKeyword list option

Given the above, the http.route attribute will be inferred as /user/list

Telepoison.get!(
  "https://www.example.com/user/list",
  [],
  ot_resource_route: "my secret path"
)

In the example above:

• "my secret path" is passed as the value for :ot_resource_routeKeyword list option

Given the above, the http.route attribute will be set as my secret path

Telepoison.get!(
  "https://www.example.com/user/list",
  [],
  ot_resource_route: :ignore
)

In the example above:

• :ignore is passed as the value for :ot_resource_routeKeyword list option

Given the above, the http.route attribute will not be set to any value

How it works

Telepoison, when executing an HTTP request to an external service, creates an OpenTelemetry span, injects the trace context propagation headers in the request headers, and ends the span once the response is received. It automatically sets some of the HTTP span attributes like http.status etc, based on the request and response data.

Telepoison by itself is not particularly useful: it becomes useful when used in conjunction with a “server-side” opentelemetry-instrumented library, e.g. opentelemetry_plug. These do the opposite work: they take the trace context information from the request headers, and they create a SERVER span which becomes the currently active span.

Using the two libraries together, it’s possible to propagate trace information across several microservices and through HTTP “jumps”.

Keep in mind

• The Erlang opentelemetry SDK stores the currently active span in a pdict, a per-process dict. If Telepoison is called from a different process than the one that initially handled the request and created the “server-side” span, Telepoison won’t find a parent span and will create a new root client span, losing the trace context. In this case, your only option to correctly propagate the trace context is to manually pass around the parent span, and pass it to Telepoison when doing the HTTP client request.

• If the request fails due to nxdomain, the process_response_status_code hook is not called and therefore the span is not ended.

What’s missing

• Set SpanKind to client
• Support for explicit parent span
• Support for fixed span attributes
• A lot of other stuff..

Copyright and License

Copyright (c) 2020 Prima.it

This work is free. You can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the MIT License. See the LICENSE.md file for more details.