The SignalFx Tracing Library for PHP provides and registers an OpenTracing-compatible global tracer that you can use to instrument your applications manually for Splunk Observability Cloud. Custom or manual instrumentation can be helpful when you need to add custom attributes to spans, or need to generate spans manually.

The following example shows how to create a custom span and attach a tag to it:

use SignalFx\GlobalTracer; // Suggested namespace over OpenTracing for GlobalTracer

function myApplicationLogic($indicator) {
   $tracer = GlobalTracer::get(); //  Will provide the tracer instance used by provided instrumentations
   $span = $tracer->startActiveSpan('myApplicationLogic')->getSpan();
   $span->setTag('indicator', $indicator);

   try {
      $widget = myAdditionalApplicationLogic($indicator);
      $span->setTag('widget', $widget);
      return $widget;
   } catch (Exception $e) {
      $span->setTag('error', true);
      throw $e;
   } finally {
      $span->finish();
   }
}