Span - CI/CD Glossary Definition
A span is the basic unit of a distributed trace: a single named operation with a start time, a duration, attributes, and a link to its parent span. A trace is a tree of spans.
What a span carries
A span records an operation name, start and end timestamps, key/value attributes (for example http.status_code), events, and a status. Parent/child relationships let a backend reconstruct causality and timing.
OpenTelemetry
In OpenTelemetry, spans are created around units of work and exported to a collector. Span attributes with very high cardinality (unique ids) can inflate storage, the same concern as metric cardinality.
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