OpenTelemetry-instrumented services show in Instana, but each span appears as an isolated fragment rather than part of a complete request. What is the most likely cause?
Select an answer to reveal the explanation.
Short Explanation
The spans made it; the thread connecting them didn't. You need to look for something in the path dropping the context headers.
Full Explanation
The correct answer is the option stating that trace context is not being propagated across the whole path, so spans arrive without the identifiers that link them. Spans are correlated by propagated trace context. When a hop - often a proxy or gateway - drops or rewrites those headers, each side of it produces spans that cannot be joined. The option saying the ingestion endpoint is unreachable from the exporters is incorrect because an unreachable endpoint would produce no spans at all, not fragmented ones. The option saying retention is too short to hold complete traces is incorrect because short retention removes old traces rather than fragmenting current ones. The option saying the services have not been given service naming rules is incorrect because naming rules affect readability, not correlation. For the exam, read fragmented traces as a context-propagation problem.