Bug: NonRecordingSpan crashes with 'NonRecordingSpan object has no attribute context' when observability exporter is enabled

[pratapladhani]

Description

When ENABLE_A365_OBSERVABILITY_EXPORTER=true is set and the token resolver returns None for the first turn (e.g., agentic auth not yet established), the OpenTelemetry TracerProvider returns a NonRecordingSpan instead of a real Span. Multiple locations in the A365 observability code access .context directly on the span object, which does not exist on NonRecordingSpan — only get_span_context() is available.

This causes the agent to crash on the very first scope creation with:

Exception caught : 'NonRecordingSpan' object has no attribute 'context'

Reproduction

1. Deploy a Python agent with ENABLE_A365_OBSERVABILITY_EXPORTER=true
2. Ensure the token resolver returns None on the first turn (e.g., agentic auth token not yet cached)
3. Send the first message via Teams @mention
4. The agent crashes with the above error

Verified against opentelemetry-api==1.33.1:

from opentelemetry.trace import NonRecordingSpan, SpanContext

s = NonRecordingSpan(SpanContext(0, 0, False))
print(hasattr(s, 'context'))          # False
print(hasattr(s, 'get_span_context')) # True
s.context                              # AttributeError
s.get_span_context()                   # Works correctly

Affected Files

File	Lines	Pattern
libraries/microsoft-agents-a365-observability-core/.../opentelemetry_scope.py	161, 270	self._span.context.span_id
libraries/microsoft-agents-a365-observability-core/.../exporters/enriched_span.py	57	return self._span.context
libraries/microsoft-agents-a365-observability-core/.../exporters/agent365_exporter.py	333	ctx = sp.context

Root Cause

The Span interface in opentelemetry-api defines get_span_context() as the public method. The .context attribute is only available on the concrete ReadableSpan / recording span implementations but not on NonRecordingSpan. The A365 code uses .context (the attribute) instead of get_span_context() (the interface method), which works for recording spans but fails for non-recording spans.

Suggested Fix

Replace all span.context attribute accesses with span.get_span_context():

# Before (broken with NonRecordingSpan):
span_id = f"{self._span.context.span_id:016x}" if self._span.context else "unknown"

# After (safe for all span types):
sc = self._span.get_span_context()
span_id = f"{sc.span_id:016x}" if sc else "unknown"

Apply the same pattern to enriched_span.py and agent365_exporter.py.

Workaround

Set ENABLE_A365_OBSERVABILITY_EXPORTER=false and redeploy.

Environment

• opentelemetry-api version: 1.33.1
• Python 3.11+
• Agent deployed to Azure App Service with Teams channel

Related

The same bug exists in microsoft/opentelemetry-distro-python (the upstream distro repo). Tracked there as microsoft/opentelemetry-distro-python#166.

[sellakumaran]

@nikhilNava , can you please take a look at this issue?