Will APM Server discard any transactions or spans which belong to a distributed trace for which the initial transaction/span has not been received by APM? I had kind of hoped that I could just create a valid traceparent
value and send it with my initial request, and that would be all that was needed.
I'd like it to be easier to decide myself when or how often I will record a distributed trace.
The simplest solution I think would be if APM Server did not discard a transaction or span which references a parent that doesn't exist. Perhaps that would lead to complications that I don't see, though!
I think another similar issue that I have is that the current W3 draft has no bits reserved for tuning the level of the trace. See here:
It has been suggested to use a tracestate
header to transmit this information, and if Elastic APM agents propagate this header to all participants in a distributed trace, then it seems that that will problem will be solved.