Jenkins Tracing

Overview

This integration helps you to monitor and observe Jenkins with OpenTelemetry by visualizing jenkins jobs and pipelines executions as distributed traces in SigNoz To know more about tracing refer here

Prerequisites

• Jenkins [>2.479.3]
• Administrative access to Jenkins controller

Setup

Step 1: Install and Configure Jenkins OpenTelemetry plugin

• For installing the plugin, please refer to this documentation.

Step 2: Set the OTLP Endpoint

Navigate to Manage Jenkins -> System -> OpenTelemetry section

In the OTLP Endpoint section, add your SigNoz ingestion endpoint ingest.<region>.signoz.cloud

Set the <region> to match your SigNoz Cloud region.

Step 3: Set the Authentication headers

In the same section click on Authentication and select Header Authentication

Add Header key as signoz-ingestion-key and create a Jenkins credential of type Secret text and store the SigNoz_Ingestion_Key

Now, navigate to Manage Jenkins -> System -> OpenTelemetry section

Enter the SigNoz self-hosted endpoint in the OTLP endpoint textbox and set No Authentication

Visualize Traces in SigNoz

In your SigNoz UI, head over to the Traces Tab, and you should be able to see your traces. You can use the trace explorer to filter and analyze your traces.

Custom Spans in Jenkinsfile

With the OTel plugin installed, you can enhance your Jenkins pipelines with custom observability by adding span attributes, creating custom spans, and enriching trace data.

Adding Custom Span Attributes

The following example shows how to add custom attributes to the current span within your Jenkins pipeline:

  pipeline {
    agent any
    stages {
      stage('Add Custom Span Attribute') {
          steps {
            script {
              withSpanAttribute(
                  key: 'my-error-prone-span',
                  value: 'new-traces',
                  type: 'STRING',
                  target: 'CURRENT_SPAN'
              )
              echo 'Custom span attribute added'
            }
          }
        }
    }
  }

What this code does:

• withSpanAttribute(): A Jenkins OTel plugin function that adds custom key-value metadata to spans
• key: 'my-error-prone-span': The attribute name that will appear in your trace data
• value: 'new-traces': The attribute value associated with the key
• type: 'STRING': Specifies the data type of the attribute (can be STRING, LONG, DOUBLE, or BOOLEAN)
• target: 'CURRENT_SPAN': Indicates that the attribute should be added to the currently active span (the stage span in this case)