How to link an instrumented mobile/web app to a service instrumented with OTel ?

[Aymeric_M]

What are the steps to ensure that a service instrumented using Opentelemetry (not possible to install OneAgent for this service) is linked to all other services and frontends in the ServiceFlow ?

We enabled "Send W3C Trace Context HTTP headers" in One Agent configuration.

Does that mean that if the web page served by a OneAgent instrumented server calls directly the OTel instrumented service there will be a trace id generated in browser ?

What about a mobile app instrumented by the Dynatrace SDK ?

[Eric_Yu · Accepted solution]

Correlation between web request and the frontend services use the following headers:
https://docs.dynatrace.com/docs/shortlink/rum-firewall#headers

Regarding traces ingested through OpenTelemetry, it wouldn't be possible unless you have a way to propagate that data from the frontend calls to your traces.

[Aymeric_M]

Thanks, I see that the W3C headers traceparent and tracestate are sent from the instrumented web frontends so the OTEL instrumented backend services should be correctly linked in the trace.
We'll see.

[Dant3]

Take into consideration that the OTEL RUM is still in SIG and talking about semantic conventions (AFIK)

Until OTEL RUM is not standardized I don't see Dynatrace adding support for WEB/Mobile App to and OTEL backend directly, since there is no OTEL RUM Specification to begin with.

Remember that the correlation today is based on cookies mostly. Not in traceid/spanid.