Troubleshooting missing traces in GitHub Actions with OpenTelemetry

patmis — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 09:54:49 GMT

Hi Community,

We're trying to monitor some of our GitHub Actions but are encountering difficulties. We've followed the instructions in the video and on the GitHub page, deploying the following:

name: Deploy OpenTelemetry
on:
  push:
    branches: main
    paths:
      - .github/workflows/**
jobs:
  deploy:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: plengauer/Thoth/actions/instrument/job@v5.16.4
        with:
          secrets_to_redact: ${{ toJSON(secrets) }}
        env:
          OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT: ${{ secrets.OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT }}
          OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_HEADERS: ${{ secrets.OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_HEADERS }}
      - name: Checkout repository
        uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - name: Deploy with OpenTelemetry Instrumentation
        uses: plengauer/Thoth/actions/instrument/deploy@v5.16.4
        with:
          github_token: ${{ secrets.ACTIONS_GITHUB_TOKEN }}
        env:
          OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT: ${{ secrets.OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT }}
          OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_HEADERS: ${{ secrets.OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_HEADERS }}

We believe the job instrumentation was added automatically. We then created a job like this:

name: Simple Action with Custom Token
on:
  push:
    branches: ["main"]
jobs:
  hello:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: plengauer/Thoth/actions/instrument/job@v5.16.4
        with:
          secrets_to_redact: ${{ toJSON(secrets) }}
        env:
          OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT: ${{ secrets.OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT }}
          OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_HEADERS: ${{ secrets.OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_HEADERS }}
      - name: Say Hello
        run: echo "Hello Observability"
      - name: Curl https://www.post.ch
        run: curl https://www.post.ch

However, we're not seeing any traces reaching our system. We've verified that the connection to our OTLP endpoint is working.

Could you please help us identify what we might be doing wrong or what we're missing?

And we intend to send the traces via one of our ActiveGates.

Thank you for your assistance,
Patrick

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Troubleshooting missing traces in GitHub Actions with OpenTelemetry