Deep link spans from the trace search page

[guo0693]

Requirement - what kind of business use case are you trying to solve?

Similar to #255 in the way we only show partial (auto expand selected spans) trace when the page first load.

We want a way to highlight spans in the trace search page. And when user click on given trace to open the detail page, automatically expand/highlight the specified spans while keep other spans collapsed.

Problem - what in Jaeger blocks you from solving the requirement?

We have analytics jobs to emit trace metrics for different services at trace/span level, for example if certain spans should have specific tag but not. The metrics have example traces. When user click on those examples, it will open the trace search page to show the list of traces. However it's very hard to quickly locate the problematic spans. So we updated the analytic jobs to include exemplar spanIds. However the jaeger-ui does not have a quick way to deep link the exemplar spans from the search page.

This will improve user experience, especially for large traces. It might be very hard to navigate through the a very long list of spans, when we know in advance the list of spanIds we are interested in, it will be very helpful for UI to just expand those spans for user.

Proposal - what do you suggest to solve the problem or improve the existing situation?

• Search page to accept url pattern:
  https://{jaeger-ui-host}/search?span={spanId1},{spanId2}@{traceId1}&span={spanId3}@{traceId2}
  and parse & save the exemplar spans.
• It will still use the list of traceIds to fetch the trace from backend.
• When user click on a trace, the trace page will open the details page using below format:
  https://{jaeger-ui-host}/trace/{traceId1}?uiFind={spanId1}&uiFind={spanId2}

Any open questions to address