2. Drop noisy spans

5 minutes

In this chapter, you use the filter processor to drop spans that match an OpenTelemetry Transformation Language (OTTL) condition.

Health checks are necessary, but their spans can be frequent and noisy. You remove spans named /_healthz before they reach the Collector’s local or cloud exporters while preserving the useful /movie-validator spans generated by the same load test.

Before filtering, a health span looks similar to:

text
InstrumentationScope healthz 1.0.0
Span #0
    Name           : /_healthz
    Kind           : Server
    Status code    : Ok
    Status message : Success

These spans can make trace searches harder and increase data volume. You drop only the known health-check operation and keep the application spans.

Continue in Config Builder with the agent_config.yaml imported in Step 1.6.

The filter runs before the Collector’s exporters. The local debug and file/traces exporters show the same filtered spans sent to Splunk Observability Cloud.