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Support OpenTelemetry's way to suppress autoinstrumentation

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#3,938 0 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Assessment

Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Newbie friendliness
35/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
java
Domain
observability

Research direction

Start by locating the configuration-resolution path for the currently supported otel.javaagent.enabled setting and compare it with the OpenTelemetry Java Agent settings named in the issue. Implement the applicable compatibility, including config-file and environment-variable precedence, then verify that resolved settings appear in the diagnostic log.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
As illustrated by this bug report, users may expect the OpenTelemetry's Java Agent's configuration settings for suppressing instrumentation would work for the App Insights Agent. However, currently only otel.javaagent.enabled is supported with a handful of other ones.

The particular parameter of interest would be otel.instrumentation.common.default-enabled aimed to suppress all default instrumentation and reversing from "I suppress N things" to "I allow N things". Going further, a combination with otel.instrumentation.opentelemetry-api.enabled=true, otel.instrumentation.opentelemetry-instrumentation-annotations.enabled=true would allow to let only user instrumentation.

Describe the solution you would like
Where applicable, be compatible with vanilla OpenTelemetry Java Agent configuration settings. If configured through the config file as well, allow properties/env variables override that configuration. Post configuration resolution into the diagnostic log.

Describe alternatives you have considered
The alternative is suppressing through configuration file and using sampling overrides, which technically is not suppression of instrumentation (and still must have performance overhead), but functionally is even more powerful for the user for limiting noisy telemetry.

Dominant language
Java
Stars
327
Forks
222
Avg merge
22h 34m
Merged PRs (30d)
14

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