[dtjohnnymonkey]

> That means what we actually want is a way to say “hey OpenTelemetry SDK, give us all the current spans in the buffer”.

Isn’t this exactly what the SpanExporter API is for? This is in the Go SDK, I suppose it may not be available in other SDKs.

I have used this API to convert OTel spans into log messages as we currently don’t have a distributed tracing vendor.