Datadog Tracing in Kong: Missing Full Trace Flow with Upstream Services

Questions
1

Hi Kong Community,

I’m experiencing an issue with Datadog tracing in my Kong Gateway setup. Here’s my scenario:

  • I’ve configured the Datadog plugin for tracing in Kong.
  • The Datadog APM interface shows traces from my custom plugin, but I don’t see the full trace flow, including the upstream services.
  • I verified that x-datadog headers (x-datadog-trace-id, x-datadog-parent-id, x-datadog-sampling-priority) are being propagated to the upstream services.
  • The upstream services are instrumented with Datadog (e.g., Spring Boot apps using dd-java-agent) and work fine when tested independently.

Any guidance or insights would be greatly appreciated!

2

I gave up on datadog plugin. It wasn’t working for me. We opted to use open telemetry plugin along with prometheus for the metrics. I can see the traces flowing from kong to all the upstream services and databases