Adding context to trace name?

[baerrach (Barrie Treloar)]

Kibana version:
v7.5.0

Elasticsearch version:
v7.5.0

APM Server version:
v7.5.0

Description of the problem including expected versus actual behavior. Please include screenshots (if relevant):

I'm building a custom command line and integrating it with Elastic APM, but this problem would also be relevant to Web frameworks as well.

When I build the distributed trace I am following the naming recommendations of transactions:

name should be a generic designation of a transaction in the scope of a single service, e.g. GET /users/:id , UsersController#show , etc.

In the Kibana UI the transactions are then listed as GET /users/:id.

In a hypothetical distributed trace that has many of these transactions it is impossible to visually see which transaction has the :id that you are interested in.

To find that transaction the user must click on each transaction and open the "Transaction details" overlay, scroll down to "Custom" (or other header), locate the key and look at the value.

What I would like the Kibana display to show is GET /users/:id {id=42), so that I can visually locate the correct transaction in the trace.

Is this possible at all?

[felixbarny (Felix Barnsteiner)]

What you could do is to add a label like span.addLabel("id", 42). Then you can search in the UI for labels.id : 42 to only see transactions with this ID.

[baerrach (Barrie Treloar)]

I'm not looking to search.

I'm just viewing the timeline of the transactions.
It'd be nice if some context was available in the title of the transaction/span as per the original description.

The title has the slug :id in it, it should be able to pull that value out of the custom context or predefined fields.