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Status Under review
Workspace Instana
Categories Tracing
Created by Guest
Created on Dec 9, 2025

RELATED IDEAS

Ability to augment Instana Autotrace traces with OpenTelemetry spans without the need to use the Instana SDK

Hi,

As a company we want to move towards OpenTelemetry in order to be ready for future developments. In some application we need to augment traces with some special information (e.g. compiled SQL statements and others) which we want to do with OTel means.

Right now it is not possible to simply get the trace context from Instana autotrace without using the Instana SDK. We want ideally only to use OpenTelemetry to rid us from any future changes should we follow a pure OTel approach. It should be like: getTraceContext -> startSpan span.setAttribute without reaching out to the Instana SDK to get the context.

We are mainly developing in Java with a handful of .NET applications.

Thanks and regards,

Rainer

Idea priority Medium
  • Admin
    Paras Kampasi
    Jan 14, 2026

    Hi,

    Thanks for reaching out. Is the requirement to provide OTel SDK or zero code agents from Instana?
    Today you should be able to use these provided by the community and then add span attributes as necessary. These attributes will then be available for filtering and visualizations within Instana.

    Kind regards,
    Paras Kampasi

    Reply

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