trace – Cannot see child transaction bar graph in apm kibana

i am new to the elastic stack and APM. We are trying to implement distributed tracing using elastic apm node.

We are propagating context over Kafka messages.

I know for a fact that the traceparent data is getting propagated and used by the consumer (because we have correlated logs across these microservices using trace id)

However, we are not able to see the child transaction bar graph in apm kibana

The package we are using is elastic-apm-node

We are manually starting a custom transaction in the Kafka consumer function. This function is async