How to Instrument a GitHub Actions Pipeline With OpenTelemetry

A workflow run maps cleanly onto a trace: the run is the root span, each job a child span, each step a grandchild.

Run an exporter after the pipeline finishes that reads the run via the GitHub API and pushes spans over OTLP. inception-health/otel-export-trace-action and corentinmusard/otel-cicd-action both turn a completed run into a trace with one job.

Steps

• Add a trigger on workflow_run (completed) so the exporter runs after your CI workflow.
• Point the exporter at your OTLP endpoint with OTLP_ENDPOINT and any auth headers.
• Pass the finished run id so the action can fetch jobs and steps.
• Open your tracing backend and find the trace named after the workflow.

Exporter workflow

on:
  workflow_run:
    workflows: ["CI"]
    types: [completed]
jobs:
  export-trace:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: corentinmusard/otel-cicd-action@v2
        with:
          otlpEndpoint: ${{ secrets.OTLP_ENDPOINT }}
          otlpHeaders: ${{ secrets.OTLP_HEADERS }}
          githubToken: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
          runId: ${{ github.event.workflow_run.id }}

Gotchas

• Trace after the run completes; steps that are still in progress have no end timestamp yet.
• The workflow_run event only fires for workflows on the default branch.

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