OpenTelemetry Tracing

obsidian-tc can emit OpenTelemetry traces, but tracing is conditional: it is a complete no-op unless observability.otel.endpoint is set. With no endpoint configured, no exporter is created and dispatch is untouched — there is zero overhead and no dependency on a live collector.

What gets traced

When an OTLP/HTTP endpoint is configured, each tool dispatch is wrapped in a single root span named obsidian_tc.<tool> (kind SERVER). There is no child-span breakdown of the call’s phases (auth/ACL/policy/impl/serialize) — that was scoped for a later release and never shipped; the root span’s attributes carry the tool name, vault id, scope class, and call status — never tool arguments, secrets, or tokens.

Every call is traced when tracing is enabled — there is no sampling knob.

Configuration

{
  "observability": {
    "otel": {
      "endpoint": "http://localhost:4318",
      "headers": { "authorization": "Bearer <token>" }
    }
  }
}

Leaving otel.endpoint unset disables tracing (no exporters, no throw).

Tracing is exercised in tests with an in-memory exporter — unconfigured asserts zero exporters and no throw; configured asserts the span shape — so no live collector is ever required.