New transform: trace to Log

[satellite-no]

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Use Cases

Traces are very hard to use in vector currently and being able to transform this event type to a log would open up many different sinks that are currently closed off to trace events as they are restricted to event data_type log. My specific use case is to send traces out the clickhouse sink which is constrained to onle log event types.

Attempted Solutions

NA

Proposal

Create a new transform similat to "Metric to Log" that converts trace data types to log data types.

References

Similar this 17412 but more built into Vector code and exposes less.

Similar to 12710 but instead of metric its to log.

Version

vector 0.43.0 (aarch64-apple-darwin 88e017f 2024-12-03 22:44:54.502541095)

[pront]

Hi @satellite-no, this sounds like a promising idea. Ultimately we want to improve traces support but this might unlock new capabilities for Vector user sooner. It would be great to see a concrete suggestion on how to implement this.

[satellite-no]

Hey @pront, That was my thought this could be a sort of crutch since the log data type is much more lose then the metric data type that i've seen floated already. While Im not a software developer I know enough to be sort of dangerious so my inital thought is keep it simple and similar to the metric_to_log transform. Keep all the trace predifined fields as key=value pairs in the log even and we can just define a host field vrl template syntax enabled and a timezone in the transform.

Im sure im missing important aspects but my thinking is log events are very customizable so it should be easier to iteratve through the fields in a trace and convert to a log, atleast easier then any other conversion.