TRACING AND SPANS

COMMON TRACING MISTAKES Several mistakes appear again and again. The first is tracing only the model calls and forgetting the tools, which leaves large gaps in the picture. The second is losing the connection between spans, so that nobody can tell which spans belong to the same run. The third is recording secrets or personal details in span attributes. The fourth is recording so little that the trace shows that something failed but not why. The fifth is never looking at traces until an emergency, so that nobody knows what a normal trace looks like. Avoid these by tracing every step, passing the identifier through everything, redacting sensitive values, recording inputs and outputs in a protected way, and reading a few healthy traces each week.