# \[JavaOpenTelemetry\] Set transaction status to ERROR
**URL:** https://discuss.elastic.co/t/javaopentelemetry-set-transaction-status-to-error/368136
**Category:** APM
**Tags:** java, open-telemetry
**Created:** [October 2, 2024, 3:34pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/javaopentelemetry-set-transaction-status-to-error/368136 "2024-10-02T15:34:54Z")
**Posts on this page:** 5
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@Jakub\_Zilinek](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/Jakub_Zilinek)
#### Post date: [October 2, 2024, 3:34pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/javaopentelemetry-set-transaction-status-to-error/368136/1 "2024-10-02T15:34:54Z")
Our stack/app:
- Kotlin
- Quarkus
- GRPC microservice
- Opentelemetry
Hi,
I need to set event.outcome to `failure` for some transactions. Currently it seems that all the transactions are returning `success` unless the processing ends with exception - hence GRPC error.
I have tried:
```auto
LocalRootSpan.current().setStatus(StatusCode.ERROR)
```
which sadly didn't work.
Does somebody have any idea how to set the status to ERROR?
Thanks 🙂
---
### Author:  [@Sylvain\_Juge](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/Sylvain_Juge)
#### Post date: [October 3, 2024, 8:25am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/javaopentelemetry-set-transaction-status-to-error/368136/2 "2024-10-03T08:25:10Z")
Hi,
If I understand it correctly, the captured grpc transaction state is success, because there is no exception thrown in the processing of it, however, maybe for a business-related reason like invalid user input you need to mark some of those transactions as errors, is that correct ?
Without pushing back on application architecture, I think in this case it would be consistent to propagate the application error to the grpc layer to make the caller aware of the error, but maybe that's not possible here.
Do you have a strong requirement to capture the status on the transaction or would having a span with an error status work as well ?
The reason I'm asking is because if you wrap your processing in a dedicated span, then you should be able to control the state of this span, the only difference is that the transaction will keep a success status, but you will be able to see the failed spans below it.
However, due to the grpc event-driven architecture this might be tricky to implement unless the processing can be wrapped in a single method call.
---
### Author:  [@Jakub\_Zilinek](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/Jakub_Zilinek)
#### Post date: [October 3, 2024, 7:21pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/javaopentelemetry-set-transaction-status-to-error/368136/3 "2024-10-03T19:21:15Z")
Hi,
sending the GRPC error to the caller isn't really a possibility since we are implementing envoy ext auth interface.
We would like to see some specific transactions in APM as failed. I will give you an example.
The transaction looks like:
```auto
envoy -> ext auth ( our app ) -> does some REST calls -> return data to envoy
```
In the cases where the REST calls fails, we would like to mark these transactions as failed.
The processing is wrapped in single method call and I can set the span to failed. As I mentioned this should be done using
```auto
LocalRootSpan.current().setStatus(StatusCode.ERROR)
```
* * *
Im using the `LocalRootSpan` the same way for labels, since in the APM you can query only the labels which are in the ROOT span of the transaction...
but this didn't mark the transaction as failed.
---
### Author:  [@Sylvain\_Juge](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/Sylvain_Juge)
#### Post date: [October 4, 2024, 9:22am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/javaopentelemetry-set-transaction-status-to-error/368136/4 "2024-10-04T09:22:03Z")
I see, you are calling `io.opentelemetry.api.trace.Span#setStatus(io.opentelemetry.api.trace.StatusCode)` but the grpc instrumentation likely calls it later and your status is ignored.
However I see that in the grpc instrumentation the `status` of span is set to `ERROR` whenever an exception is thrown, if I'm not mistaken this is done here in the opentelemetry java instrumentation: `io.opentelemetry.instrumentation.api.instrumenter.DefaultSpanStatusExtractor#extract`
So here either throwing an exception or using grpc way to indicate failure by setting the value of `io.grpc.Status` for the call should probably be better here as the `io.grpc.Status` status from grpc should be translated to opentelemetry span status.
---
### Author:  [@Jakub\_Zilinek](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/Jakub_Zilinek)
#### Post date: [October 10, 2024, 1:11pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/javaopentelemetry-set-transaction-status-to-error/368136/5 "2024-10-10T13:11:59Z")
Hey I have reimplemented the solution and it turns out that returning GRPC error status code doesn't make the transaction as `event.outcome: failure`.
Currently Im returning GPRC `RESOURCE EXHAUSTED` which end in the transaction labels -\>
`transaction.result: ResourceExhausted` but the outcome is still `success`.