Exception spans not creating Issues in Issues (Beta)

[OlafKwiek]

Description

Hi Logfire team,

Issues (Beta) are enabled for my project, but exception spans that show up in traces/Live View are not creating Issues in the Issues UI.

What I expected
Given the docs say “Issues are automatically created when Logfire detects exceptions in your application”, I expected each distinct uncaught exception to create (or be grouped into) an Issue when:

• The span has otel_status_code = "ERROR".
• The span has exception events with exception.type, exception.message, and exception.stacktrace.
  ​

What I see instead

• I can see the spans and traces in Logfire (for the correct project and environment).
• Issues are enabled for the project in the Issues page.
• No Issues appear in the Issues UI, even after waiting several minutes and adjusting time range / environment filters.
  ​

Example span
Here is a redacted example of a single span that I would expect to create an Issue:

json

{
  "created_at": 1767969587039.103,
  "start_timestamp": "2026-01-09T14:39:45.928427Z",
  "end_timestamp": "2026-01-09T14:39:45.930970Z",
  "trace_id": "019ba332fb03ce5e646ed3d0babce1da",
  "span_id": "c693395499a46c78",
  "kind": "span",
  "level": 17,
  "parent_span_id": "228152afc1fdfa20",
  "span_name": "Test span",
  "message": "Test span",
  "is_exception": true,
  "exception_type": "Exception",
  "otel_status_code": "ERROR",
  "otel_status_message": "Exception: Test error",
  "otel_events": [
    {
      "event_name": "exception",
      "event_timestamp": "2026-01-09T14:39:45.929356Z",
      "attributes": {
        "exception.escaped": "False",
        "exception.message": "Test exception log",
        "exception.stacktrace": "Exception: Test exception log\n",
        "exception.type": "Exception"
      }
    },
    {
      "event_name": "exception",
      "event_timestamp": "2026-01-09T14:39:45.930308Z",
      "attributes": {
        "exception.escaped": "True",
        "exception.message": "Test error",
        "exception.stacktrace": "Traceback (most recent call last):\n  File \".../logfire.py\", line 66, in test_issue\n    raise Exception(\"Test error\")\nException: Test error\n",
        "exception.type": "Exception"
      }
    }
  ],
  "attributes": {
    "code.filepath": "api/external_apis/logfire.py",
    "code.function": "test_issue",
    "code.lineno": 64,
    "logfire.msg_template": "Test span"
  },
  "otel_resource_attributes": {
    "deployment.environment.name": "dev",
    "service.name": "my-kwiek-api",
    "service.version": "dd9d717dd8ec4252bcf463452af1c5bcc5658467",
    "telemetry.sdk.language": "python",
    "telemetry.sdk.name": "opentelemetry",
    "telemetry.sdk.version": "1.38.0"
  }
}

(Full span available if needed.)

Environment

• Logfire Python SDK version:
• OpenTelemetry Python version: 1.38.0
• Python version: 3.14.0
• Environment: dev
• Service name: my-kwiek-api

Configured roughly as:

python
import logfire

logfire.configure(
    service_name="my-kwiek-api",
    # other config (write token, environment, etc.)
)

def test_issue():
    with logfire.span("Test span"):
        raise Exception("Test error")

Questions

• Is there any additional requirement for an exception span to generate an Issue (e.g. only uncaught top-level exceptions, HTTP spans, particular attributes, etc.)?
• Is there a known limitation or bug in the current Issues (Beta) implementation that would explain exception spans not generating Issues?

Thanks in advance, and happy to provide a trace link or more JSON if that helps.

Python, Logfire & OS Versions, related packages (not required)

3.14

[alexmojaki]

Is there any additional requirement for an exception span to generate an Issue (e.g. only uncaught top-level exceptions, HTTP spans, particular attributes, etc.)?

Yes, top-level being the key in your case, because I see a parent_span_id. See https://logfire.pydantic.dev/docs/reference/api/types/#logfire.types.ExceptionCallbackHelper.create_issue.

[OlafKwiek]

Thanks for your response. A little background on my application. I use FastAPI for my backend and have several subapps mounted on my main app to split the documentation for different users.

In the Logfire docs I see the following:
`
By default, issues are only created for exceptions on spans where:

• The level is 'error' or higher or is unset (see level_is_unset for details),
• No parent span exists in the current process,
• The exception isn't handled by FastAPI, except if it's a 5xx HTTPException.
  `

So I have tested the exception handling in the subapps. The issue is that when using subapps, the error handling is done in the subapp and not in the instrumented app. I have now instrumented the main app and the subapp and the issue creation works, but now I see the first endpoint log twice in the dashboard. Do you have a solution for that?

[alexmojaki]

Can you share some code and screenshots of logs so that I can understand better?