Attributes passed to get_tracer() do not appear in spans

[mtakuma]

Describe your environment

OS: MacOS Python version: Python 3.11.13 SDK version: 1.39.1 API version: 1.39.1

What happened?

I find attributes parameter of TracerProvider.get_tracer() documented as

Specifies the attributes of the emitted telemetry.

I expect the attributes passed here will appear in every trace created by the tracer, but cannot see the behavior. What do I miss to do or misunderstand?

Steps to Reproduce

Based on the example https://opentelemetry.io/docs/languages/python/getting-started/#traces I added attributes parameter:

from random import randint
from flask import Flask

from opentelemetry import trace

# Acquire a tracer
tracer = trace.get_tracer("diceroller.tracer", attributes={"attr-name":"attr-value"})

app = Flask(__name__)

@app.route("/rolldice")
def roll_dice():
    return str(roll())

def roll():
    # This creates a new span that's the child of the current one
    with tracer.start_as_current_span("roll") as rollspan:
        res = randint(1, 6)
        rollspan.set_attribute("roll.value", res)
        return res

Expected Result

{"attr-name":"attr-value"} appears in the generated span

Actual Result

Cannot see {"attr-name":"attr-value"} in the generated span

Additional context

No response

Would you like to implement a fix?

No

Tip

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[xrmx]

attributes Specifies the instrumentation scope attributes to associate with emitted telemetry, refer to https://opentelemetry.io/docs/specs/otel/trace/api/#get-a-tracer

[mtakuma]

Thank you for the more specific documentation.

If I want to ensure that every span from a specific tracer has specific customer.id attribute, is this the right way to have multiple TracerProviders per customer ID and set the customer ID as resource of the TracerProvider? I was assuming each tracer's attributes could be used for that purpose with single TracerProvider, but it seems not.

[aabmass]

Typically something like customer id would be different each time the traced code runs, so you wouldn't want to associate a single tracer with a customer. I would expect customer id to be a span attribute.

Outside of the specific use case, what you did with scope attributes does work too, but it's possible your trace backend/database just doesn't surface the scope attributes. For example here's how it looks in otel-tui