How does Tracing Work?
The components behind tracing
Instrumentation
In order for an application to emit traces for analysis, the application must be instrumented. Your application can be manually instrumented or be automatically instrumented. With phoenix, there a set of plugins (instrumentors) that can be added to your application's startup process that perform auto-instrumentation. These plugins collect spans for your application and export them for collection and visualization. For phoenix, all the instrumentors are managed via a single repository called OpenInference. The comprehensive list of instrumentors can be found in the how-to guide.
Exporter
An exporter takes the spans created via instrumentation and exports them to a collector. In simple terms, it just sends the data to the Phoenix. When using Phoenix, most of this is completely done under the hood when you call instrument on an instrumentor.
Collector
The Phoenix server is a collector and a UI that helps you troubleshoot your application in real time. When you run or run phoenix (e.x. px.launch_app(), container), Phoenix starts receiving spans form any application(s) that is exporting spans to it.
OpenTelememetry Protocol
OpenTelemetetry Protocol (or OTLP for short) is the means by which traces arrive from your application to the Phoenix collector. Phoenix currently supports OTLP over HTTP.
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