[Question] Why does a trace has OK Status when span in trace fails?

[Systep-AI]

Hi everyone,

I’m working with self-hosted Arize Phoenix v11.21.1 and noticed something regarding trace error statuses.

In one of our LLM workflows, a step failed but the overall trace status still appeared as OK. I recall that in earlier Phoenix versions, if at least one span in a trace failed, the whole trace would be marked with an error status.

• Has this behavior changed in recent versions?
• Is the current behavior (all traces showing OK even if a span fails) the intended design?
• Or should we be handling this directly in our flow instead of relying on the trace status?

Thanks!

[dosubot[bot]]

Hi @Systep-AI! I'm Dosu and I’m helping the phoenix team.

The current behavior in Phoenix v11.21.1—where a trace shows an OK status even if one or more spans fail—is intentional and not the result of a recent change. The overall trace status is set by the root span (or parent-level span) and is not automatically aggregated from all contained spans. If you want the trace to reflect an error when any span fails, you should set the error status explicitly in your workflow, typically on the root span during instrumentation. There have been no recent updates or changes to this logic in the codebase, and no documentation or issues indicate a switch from aggregation-over-spans to the current design. This means error propagation to the trace level is not automatic and should be handled in your flow if needed.
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[RogerHYang]

Sorry for the slow reply! The change was made here since child span errors are often not true/final errors for the entire trace. To support both use cases, we’d likely need to make this configurable. Feel free to open an issue and we can discuss next steps.