ROS Message Support for Tracing?

[lexi-brt]

Hi!

Have y'all seen any implementations of tracing in a ROS system using std_msgs? (For more info on what I mean by tracing see here: https://microsoft.github.io/code-with-engineering-playbook/observability/log-vs-metric-vs-trace/)

One of the teams in our org defined custom messages for everything rather than using std_msgs so that they could include fields to support tracing messages to originating info and events. Basically they add an id field to every message that is similar to the seq field in std_msgs/Header, but they copy that ID to derivative messages.

So if an image is captured it will tag itself with an original id, but when perception algorithms output detection information based on that image, they will include a reference to that image's id field. And if some kind of event occurs as a result of those perception results, then the event info will also include the original image's unique id.

I think that it would be really nice to do be able to do this without using custom messages, as none of their stack works with any of the standard ROS tools :/

Is there a standard way of doing this kind of thing in ROS? Or would it be feasible for me to draft a proposal for an edit to std_msgs/Header to support tracing?