Enabling OpenTelemetry Tracing for the Actions Runner

[bixu]

Why are you starting this discussion?

Product Feedback

What GitHub Actions topic or product is this about?

Actions Runner

Discussion Details

I work for a relatively large financial services company, and we use mostly self-hosted Actions Runners for a number of reasons related to our domain and regulatory concerns.

One issue we've repeatedly had with the Runner is job startup times that are tough to troubleshoot. We have distributed OpenTelemetry tracing for almost all of our other core services, so it's quite frustrating to have only metrics available when debugging Runner performance issues. Consider this a request to add tracing support for the Runner.

Possible Criteria

• Have an optional Runner config key, tracing_enabled, to toggle tracing on/off
  • Should default to tracing_enabled:false
• Have a child config key, tis_enabled, to toggle TLS for the Otel exporter endpoint on/off
  • Should default to tls_enabled:true
• The service.name Resource attribute must be set for all traces emitted
• The Helm chart for managing self-hosted Runners must provide an interface to these configs

Out-of-Scope

• Tracing support outside of OpenTelemetry
• Setting advanced Otel configs like HTTP headers (these would usually be handled by the Otel Collector)

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