Make Spans autoClosable

Elastic Observability APM
1

Hello,

I am currently evaluating the APM API to enrich the apm data sown in kibana. I am currently following the guideline createSpan.
Would it be possible to implement AutoClosable in Span/Transaction? I find it easier to read:
try(Span span = parent.createSpan()) {
span.setName("SELECT FROM customer");
span.setType("db.mysql.query");
}

In comparison to:
Span span = parent.createSpan();
try {
span.setName("SELECT FROM customer");
span.setType("db.mysql.query");
} finally {
span.end();
}

2

Hi Wolfram and thanks for your question.

We did actually consider this but unfortunately, try-with-resources doesn't really work out nicely for spans. The reason is that the close() method gets executed before any exceptions are caught. So this would be invalid, for example:

try (Span span = parent.createSpan()) {
    span.setName("SELECT FROM customer");
    span.setType("db.mysql.query");
} catch (Exception e) {
    // invalid, because span has already been ended
    span.captureException(e);
}

To simplify span creation you can also use the @CaptureSpan annotation.

3

Hello Felix,

Thanks for your response - I didn't see that coming! This order of events was really unexpected to me but good to know. I will try to use the Annotation way then.

4

AutoClosable is designed for resource management where this order of events makes sense but for Spans it unfortunately does not map nicely.