B3 Propagation — Single and Multi-Header Forms (txt)
B3 context propagation in both shapes — the compact single b3 header including the debug flag, a legacy 64-bit trace ID and the sampling-only form, plus the five X-B3-* multi-header fields — with two malformed values that must be rejected.
# B3 propagation (Zipkin). '#' lines are commentary.
# --- single header: b3: {TraceId}-{SpanId}-{SamplingState}-{ParentSpanId} ---
b3: 4bf92f3577b34da6a3ce929d0e0e4736-2b3c4d5e6f708192-1-00f067aa0ba902b7
b3: 4bf92f3577b34da6a3ce929d0e0e4736-00f067aa0ba902b7-1
b3: 4bf92f3577b34da6a3ce929d0e0e4736-00f067aa0ba902b7-0
# debug flag
b3: 4bf92f3577b34da6a3ce929d0e0e4736-00f067aa0ba902b7-d
# 64-bit trace id (legacy, still legal)
b3: a3ce929d0e0e4736-00f067aa0ba902b7-1
# sampling-only: 'do not trace', with no IDs at all
b3: 0
# --- multi header ---
X-B3-TraceId: 4bf92f3577b34da6a3ce929d0e0e4736
X-B3-SpanId: 2b3c4d5e6f708192
X-B3-ParentSpanId: 00f067aa0ba902b7
X-B3-Sampled: 1
X-B3-Flags: 1
# --- invalid ---
# span id must be 16 hex characters
b3: 4bf92f3577b34da6a3ce929d0e0e4736-00f067aa0ba902-1
# sampling state must be 0, 1 or d
b3: 4bf92f3577b34da6a3ce929d0e0e4736-00f067aa0ba902b7-true
Specifications
- Single Header Cases
- 6
- Multi Header Fields
- 5
- Invalid Cases
- 2
- Supports64 Bit Trace Id
- true
- Debug Flag
- d
Testing contract
Reference control- Scenario
- Parse each header line with a B3 extractor and compare against the W3C traceparent fixture.
- Expected result
- The 64-bit trace ID is left-padded to 128 bits, 'b3: 0' yields a valid deny-sampling decision with no IDs, and the two malformed lines are rejected.
What is a .txt file?
TXT is a plain-text file containing unformatted character data with no styling or structure beyond line breaks. Its interpretation depends on character encoding, most commonly UTF-8, and on line-ending convention. It is the most universal and portable text container.
How to use this file
Use an example TXT to test encoding detection, line-ending (LF versus CRLF) handling, and any tool that reads or streams raw text input.
How to use this file for testing
“B3 Propagation — Single and Multi-Header Forms (txt)” is a deterministic Novus Examples fixture for Observability, Schema validation, Config parsing. Structured and plain-text telemetry with known timestamps, levels, request identifiers, and error states for testing log ingestion, correlation, dashboards, and alert pipelines.
Documented properties for this file: TXT · 892 bytes. Compare results against paired or grouped companions on this page when present (clean↔damaged, searchable↔scanned, or format twins) so scores stay reproducible across runs.
Download the file once, keep the path stable in CI or local scripts, and treat the spec table as the contract: dimensions, seeds, field lists, and roles are intentional. Corrupt or invalid samples are labelled as such — expect parsers to fail loudly rather than silently accept them.
Telemetry fixtures use fixed trace IDs, span IDs, and timestamps so ingestion is reproducible run to run. Point your collector, parser, or query layer at the file and assert the documented span tree, metric families, or severity mix; service and host names are invented.
Related files
- yamlService Level Objectives — Two SLOs in One Multi-Document YAML (yaml)Two SLOs — availability and latency — in one multi-document YAML separated by ---, each defined as a ratio of good events to total over a rolling 28-day window. The latency SLO measures the le="1" bucket against the count, which is the correct way to do it from a histogram.
- jsonOTLP Trace — All-Zero Trace and Span IDs, Intentionally Invalid (json)A trace whose trace ID and root span ID are all zeroes — the value an uninitialised context produces. Intentionally invalid: the specification defines all-zero IDs as invalid, so a conformant receiver must reject the spans instead of creating a permanent bucket that every broken service writes into.
- jsonOTLP Trace — Duplicate Span IDs, Intentionally Invalid (json)Two different spans share one span ID inside a single trace, which the specification forbids. Intentionally invalid: it is the fixture for the de-duplication path, where a naive store silently overwrites one span with the other and loses a subtree.
- jsonOTLP Trace — Empty but Valid Batch (json)A structurally valid OTLP export containing no spans at all — what an exporter sends when every span in the interval was sampled out. The empty-input case that ingestion code routinely mistakes for an error.
- jsonOTLP Trace — Negative and Zero Durations, Intentionally Invalid (json)One span ends 8.4 ms before it started and another has identical start and end timestamps. Intentionally invalid: negative durations poison latency aggregates — a single one can drag a p99 below zero — so this is the fixture for the validation that must sit in front of any duration metric.
- jsonOTLP/JSON Trace — 13-Span Checkout Request (json)A complete OTLP/JSON trace export: one checkout request across five services as 13 spans, four levels deep, with HTTP, database, RPC and messaging semantic-convention attributes, span events and a producer span. Trace and span IDs are fixed, so ingesting it twice produces identical output.
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