OTLP Trace — Clock Skew, Child Starts Before Its Parent (json)
Two hosts whose clocks disagree by 12 ms, so a server span appears to start before the client span that called it. Nothing in the payload is malformed — this is the most common real cause of a negative-latency gap in a waterfall, and viewers must show it rather than crash or silently reorder.
{
"resourceSpans": [
{
"resource": {
"attributes": [
{
"key": "service.name",
"value": {
"stringValue": "checkout-api"
}
},
{
"key": "service.namespace",
"value": {
"stringValue": "shop"
}
},
{
"key": "service.version",
"value": {
"stringValue": "1.14.2"
}
},
{
"key": "service.instance.id",
"value": {
"stringValue": "checkout-api-7d9f4c-2xk"
}
},
{
"key": "deployment.environment.name",
"value": {
"stringValue": "staging"
}
},
{
"key": "host.name",
"value": {
"stringValue": "node-a1"
}
},
{
"key": "host.ip",
"value": {
"stringValue": "192.0.2.11"
}
},
{
"key": "cloud.region",
"value": {Specifications
- Spans
- 6
- Skewed Service
- cart-api
- Skew Ms
- -12
- Child Starts Before Parent
- true
- Violates Spec
- false
Testing contract
Expected to recover- Scenario
- Render the waterfall and compute each child's offset from its parent.
- Expected result
- The cart-api server span starts 12 ms before the checkout-api client span that called it, producing a negative offset the viewer must display or clamp explicitly instead of dropping the span.
What is a .json file?
JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is a lightweight, text-based data-interchange format representing objects, arrays, strings, numbers, booleans, and null. It is language-independent, human-readable, and the dominant format for web APIs and configuration. It requires a single well-formed root value.
How to use this file
Use an example JSON file to test parsers and serializers, schema validation, Unicode and number-precision handling, and API request or response processing.
How to use this file for testing
“OTLP Trace — Clock Skew, Child Starts Before Its Parent (json)” is a deterministic Novus Examples fixture for Observability, Error handling, JSON 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: JSON · 14,034 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.
Code examples
import json
with open("otlp-trace-clock-skew.json") as f:
data = json.load(f)
print(type(data), len(data))Related files
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