Unclear documentation for custom observability backend URLs

[harveyrendell]

Describe your use-case which is not covered by existing documentation.

Hi there,

I am trying to configure a custom observability backend for New Relic using the following template https://one.newrelic.com/distributed-tracing?account=********&state=${traceId} as described in the url template example:

Trace visualization URL template
e.g. 'https://my-observability.example.com:5601/traces/\$\{traceId}'

However this causes pipelines to fail with the following errors:

groovy.lang.GroovyRuntimeException: Failed to parse template script (your template may contain an error or be trying to use expressions not currently supported): startup failed:

GStringTemplateScript39.groovy: 2: unexpected char: '\' @ line 2, column 134.
   ****&state=\$\{traceid}

and after modifying it to remove the additional backslashes:

groovy.lang.MissingPropertyException: No such property: traceid for class: groovy.lang.Binding

Is traceId supposed to be set here? or is there some other prerequisite before I can configure a custom backend. These pipelines are using the multibranch pipeline type.

Thanks

Reference any relevant documentation, other materials or issues/pull requests that can be used for inspiration.

https://github.com/jenkinsci/opentelemetry-plugin/blob/c03877572faca269d3691d1349976aebcf603ba9/src/main/resources/io/jenkins/plugins/opentelemetry/backend/CustomObservabilityBackend/config.jelly#L7

[cyrille-leclerc]

You are right that documentation is poor. We are incrementally improving. See

https://github.com/jenkinsci/opentelemetry-plugin/blob/0d8379807baf74026945863959e564a8ec443e18/src/main/java/io/jenkins/plugins/opentelemetry/backend/ObservabilityBackend.java#L173-L193

You should use traceId instead of traceid

[cyrille-leclerc]

There is a bug in the visualization, you should not use \ escape chars.

Please enter an url template like https://example.com/${traceId} and it will produce urls like https://example.com/4909241c7fe6438a95a25859375c2d07

[cyrille-leclerc]

See improvement:

• https://github.com/jenkinsci/opentelemetry-plugin/pull/765

[DuMaM]

Hi, I was fighting with NewRelic support for about a week. According to them, the value of state query is different from a trace ID. It's some random number connected with user session returned from NewRelic backend. Currently, there is no way to add tarceID URL which will redirect you to the Web UI page. You can only add URL to the dashboard to be visible for your users.

https://one.newrelic.com/distributed-tracing?account=********&state=${traceId}

btw. @cyrille-leclerc if you want you can put this into docs 😉