Span Does Not Reference Parent Span

[JacksonWeber]

Description

Currently we do not provide a parent span in the form of a Span, SpanContext, or null on Spans. We only provide the parentSpanId which does not comply with the spec.

We should add an attribute to the span to track this value. Likely called parentSpanContext. Ideally, following a similar implementation as OpenTelemetry-Java.

Describe the solution you'd like

Implement the specification

[pichlermarc]

Related spec: https://opentelemetry.io/docs/specs/otel/trace/sdk/#additional-span-interfaces

[dyladan]

The interface @pichlermarc points out is the only way you'd be able to access this, but the link to otel java provided in the OP is the span implementation itself, not the readable span interface. It would be a necessary part of the implementation for the interface though.

[pichlermarc]

Summary from the SIG on Wednesday: we agreed that we should change the ReadableSpan interface to include parentSpanContext and that we'd drop parentSpanId in favor of that. This way we're specification compiant on ReadableSpan

@JacksonWeber agreed to work on this.