opentelemetry-js: Cannot get HTTP Context Propagation to work

What happened?

Hi, I have set up OTEL tracing but can’t get context propagation to work.

In my setup I have a web app that interacts with an express service that calls another express service. The services export traces to using Grpc a local Collector and are then exported to Jaeger. I can see the spans are exported fine, contain information from the http and express instrumentation libraries but context hasn’t been propagated - The relevant spans don’t have a parent and the relevant HTTP requests don’t contain the HTTP Headers that are needed.

The example project is here: https://github.com/tglanz/simple-tracing. The components are:

Web --> Die Roller --> Randomizer

The OTEL is being set up automatically by running node with some relevant OTEL env vars and specifically NODE_OPTIONS="--require @opentelemetry/auto-instrumentations-node/register".

Note that I also tried initializing OTEL manually with the same results.

In the example repository, running docker compose up will deploy the Web App at http://localhost:5173, the Die Roller at http://localhost:8000, the Randomizer service, a Collector with an OTLP Grpc receiver at http://localhost:4173 and a Jaeger FE at http://localhost:16686.

The collector logs (attached) don’t show any error that looks relevant.

Is there any issue here or do I miss something basic? Thanks!

OpenTelemetry Setup Code

Run the first service using node with the env variables below

export OTEL_TRACES_EXPORTER="otlp"
export OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_PROTOCOL="grpc"
export OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_COMPRESSION="gzip"
export OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_TRACES_ENDPOINT="http://collector:4317"
export OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_HEADERS=""
export OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_TRACES_HEADERS=""
export OTEL_RESOURCE_ATTRIBUTES=""
export OTEL_NODE_RESOURCE_DETECTORS="env,host,os"
export OTEL_SERVICE_NAME="die-roller"
export OTEL_LOG_LEVEL="info"
export OTEL_PROPAGATORS=b3,tracecontext,baggage
export OTEL_TRACES_SAMPLES=always_on
export NODE_OPTIONS="--require @opentelemetry/auto-instrumentations-node/register"

Run the second service using similar env vars but only the service name is changed.

package.json

{
  "name": "service-a",
  "version": "1.0.0",
  "description": "",
  "main": "index.js",
  "type": "module",
  "scripts": {
    "start": "node server.js",
    "test": "echo \"Error: no test specified\" && exit 1"
  },
  "keywords": [],
  "author": "",
  "license": "ISC",
  "dependencies": {
    "@opentelemetry/api": "^1.6.0",
    "@opentelemetry/auto-instrumentations-node": "^0.39.4",
    "cors": "^2.8.5",
    "express": "^4.18.2",
    "pino-http": "^8.5.0",
    "pino-pretty": "^10.2.3"
  }
}

Relevant log output

The collector log was to big for putting in the issue and can be found here: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tglanz/simple-tracing/main/service/collector.log