Disabling the agent entirely

You can disable the agent using -Dotel.javaagent.enabled=false (or using the equivalent environment variable OTEL_JAVAAGENT_ENABLED=false).

Suppressing specific agent instrumentation

You can suppress agent instrumentation of specific libraries by using -Dotel.instrumentation.[name].enabled=false (or using the equivalent environment variable OTEL_INSTRUMENTATION_[NAME]_ENABLED) where name (NAME) is the corresponding instrumentation name:

Note: When using environment variables, dashes (-) should be converted to underscores (_). For example, to suppress traces from akka-actor library, set OTEL_INSTRUMENTATION_AKKA_ACTOR_ENABLED to false.

Even more fine-grained control

You can also exclude specific classes from being instrumented.

This can be useful to completely silence spans from a given class/package.

Or as a quick workaround for an instrumentation bug, when byte code in one specific class is problematic.

This option should not be used lightly, as it can leave some instrumentation partially applied, which could have unknown side-effects.

If you find yourself needing to use this, it would be great if you could drop us an issue explaining why, so that we can try to come up with a better solution to address your need.

Enable manual instrumentation only

You can suppress all auto instrumentations but have support for manual instrumentation with @WithSpan and normal API interactions by using -Dotel.instrumentation.common.default-enabled=false -Dotel.instrumentation.opentelemetry-annotations.enabled=true

Enable instrumentation suppression by type

Some of the libraries that this agent instruments in turn use lower-level libraries, that are also instrumented. This results in nested CLIENT spans (a span with the kind CLIENT has a child span with the same kind CLIENT). For example spans produced by Reactor Netty instrumentation will have children spans produced by Netty instrumentation. Or Dynamo DB spans produced by AWS SDK instrumentation will have children spans produced by http protocol library instrumentation.

Although OpenTelemetry specification allows such situation, such nested spans often produce duplicate data without any added benefit. For this reason this agent by default suppresses nested CLIENT spans and emits only the top-level one.

By setting -Dotel.instrumentation.experimental.outgoing-span-suppression-by-type=true you can enable a more sophisticated suppression strategy: only CLIENT spans of the same semantic convention type (e.g. DB, HTTP, RPC) will be suppressed. For example, if we have a database client which uses Reactor Netty http client which uses Netty networking library, then without any suppression we would have 3 nested spans:

• CLIENT span with database semantic attributes from the database client instrumentation
• CLIENT span with http semantic attributes from Reactor Netty instrumentation
• CLIENT span with http semantic attributes from Netty instrumentation

With default suppresion, we would have 1 span:

• CLIENT span with database semantic attributes from the database client instrumentation

With suppresion by type, we would have 2 nested spans:

• CLIENT span with database semantic attributes from the database client instrumentation
• CLIENT span with http semantic attributes from Reactor Netty instrumentation