Troubleshooting Orphaned Spans in Google Cloud with OpenTelemetry

Saurabh K. · 2025-10-21T17:40:38.040Z

I instrumented my code using arize-otel and opentelemetry-fastapi and tracing in my local python processes works great but when I run the same thing on a container in gcloud , I get exclamation "The span is orphabed. Its parent span is missing from the trace". But all the spans are getting produced correctly and they are being linked as well.

Saurabh K.
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yes , I want step by step process. Also I see that in spans Attributes I have user email and id. But in display I only see the id , the email column is empty. "user": { "email": "saurabh@obin.ai", "id": "user_33Sq6QIvzI0aLs4wpLtWNLV1lM3", "tenant": "default", "token_type": "clerk_jwt" },
Saurabh K.
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RunLLM see above screenshot and problem statement
Saurabh K.
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attributes.user.id and attributes.user.email are at the same hierarchy 🔒[private user]
Dat
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Saurabh K. just to confirm locally is good, but container is missing there might be a couple reasons for this, can you try a flush in your container, my gut is that you're batching export the spans and the spans might not be exciting the application
Dat
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https://arize.com/docs/ax/observe/tracing/configure-tracing-options/customize-auto-instrumentation#batch-vs-simple-span-processors
Dat
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use the OTEL flush and it might fix it
Dat
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keep me posted if it works
Saurabh K.
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where should I use the OTEL flush, am using python arize-otel. Also my containers are long running containers, not ephemeral ?
Saurabh K.
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In the local and GCP container, I want to use the same. So BatchSpanProcessor/SimpleSpanProcessor should be same. How do I verify which one is on mylocal ?
Dat
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Saurabh K. just to make sure all the spans are in arize, they are just coming in separately? can you screenshot the local traces (what you want) vs what happening in container (what you don't want)
Saurabh K.
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🔒[private user] So on the gcloud container instances, my Traces tab is empty but my Spans tab are getting filled. The Caution ! symbol, says that it's Orphan span, parent span not found in Traces
Saurabh K.
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But on the local python run, everything works great
Dat
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can you show me the local traces
Dat
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just for me to reference
Saurabh K.
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23 comments