Recommendation for setting up OTEL with graphql-yoga

[kdawgwilk]

I have been using the '@opentelemetry/instrumentation-graphql package for a bit but it does not create spans for resolvers with graphql-yoga so I recently added the @envelop/opentelemetry plugin but it does not create active parent spans for each resolver so i am unable to see what other spans happened inside each resolver which IMO makes it mostly useless for tracing. Am I missing something or this there just not good tooling for tracing for graphql-yoga yet and it needs to be built?

PS I did put up a PR for the plugin to fix the tracing but ran into issues so I might continue work on that if there is nothing else

[EmrysMyrddin]

Hi! We have built a new OTEL integration @graphql-hive/plugin-opentelemetry that you can find here: https://github.com/graphql-hive/gateway/tree/main/packages/plugins/opentelemetry

You can find the documentation here: https://the-guild.dev/graphql/hive/docs/gateway/monitoring-tracing#opentelemetry-traces
We don't have a Yoga specific docs for now, but you can use the same setup than Programatic usage, which manually instantiate the plugin, just as you would do in Yoga.

This plugin is compatible with OpenTelemetry Context, which fixes your second issue.

For resolvers tracing, this is not implemented yet on purpose. We strongly advise against tracing resolvers, because of the performance cost it introduces. We also think that resolver is not the right level for tracing. We strongly advise to instead trace your datasources, which will make more sense and be less verbose than resolvers (like on lists).

That being said, we think about implementing resolver level tracing with some mechanism to select which resolver should be traced. But we want to gather more use cases and feedback before taking an actual decision about how the API would look like.