We're working on getting traces for stand-alone client applications in https://github.com/googleapis/google-cloud-python. To start with, we're trying to get traces for some of our system tests for clients based on grpc architecture: googleapis/google-cloud-python#6298. Our expectation was that we'd see multiple traces. Instead, we saw multiple spans in a single trace. @liyanhui1228 suggested that this was expected behavior. That's different from what I've seen in Java.

We would like a mechanism to configure the Tracer to do the following:

• If there is a parent span configure in some "context", attach grpc spans to that parent span,.
• If there isn't a parent span, then the grpc span should result in an independent trace.

@c24t was in that meeting, and suggested that I add this issue. Adding @dinooliva as an FYI.