Can Open Telemetry Instrument Two Express Services in the Same Node Program? - node.js

Question

Let's say I have a NodeJS program that has two separate instances of an express server running.
const express = require('express')
const app1 = express()
app1.listen(3000, () => { //... })
//...
const app2 = express()
app2.listen(3001, () => { //... })
I've been able to instrument a program like this via open telemetry, and have my spans sent/exported successfully to Zipkin. All I needed to do is/was add code like the following to the start of my program.
const { NodeTracerProvider } = require('#opentelemetry/node');
const { ZipkinExporter } = require('#opentelemetry/exporter-zipkin');
const provider = new NodeTracerProvider({
plugins: {
express: {
enabled: true,
},
http: {
requestHook: (span, request) => {
span.setAttribute("custom request hook attribute", "request");
},
},
}
});
const options = {
url: 'http://localhost:9411/api/v2/spans',
serviceName: 'service-main'
}
const zipkinExporter = new ZipkinExporter(options);
provider.addSpanProcessor(new SimpleSpanProcessor(zipkinExporter))
provider.register();
and make sure that the express and http plugins were/are installed
npm install #opentelemetry/plugin-http #opentelemetry/plugin-express
This all works great -- except for one thing. Open Telemetry sees both my express services running as the same service-main service.
When I instrumented these services directly with Zipkin -- I would add the Zipkin middleware to each running express server
app1.use(zipkinMiddleware({tracer: tracer1}));
app2.use(zipkinMiddleware({tracer: tracer2}));
Each tracer could be instantiated with its own service name, which allowed each service to have its individual name and show up as a different service in Zipkin.
(/main, /hello, and /goobye are all service via a different express service in the above URL)
Is this sort of thing (instrumenting two services in one program) possible with Open Telemetry? Or would I need to separate these two services out into separate programs in order to have each services have an individual name? This question is less about solving a particular problem, and more about understanding the semantics of Open Telemetry.

Answer 1

It is possible to create two separate tracer providers. Only one of them will be the global tracer provider, which the API will use if you call API methods. You can't use the plugins in this configuration, which means you will have to manually instrument your application. If this is a use-case which is important to you, I suggest you create an issue on the github repo.

Answer 2

yes, you can have multiple express running in the same node process (thats how clustering works in node as well)
but you will need to have them running on different ports.;
# const express = require('express')
const app1 = express()
app1.listen(3001, () => { //... })
//...
const app2 = express()
app2.listen(3002, () => { //... })