5. Dropping Spans

10 minutes  

In this section, we will explore how to use the Filter Processor to selectively drop spans based on certain conditions.

Specifically, we will drop traces based on the span name, which is commonly used to filter out unwanted spans such as health checks or internal communication traces. In this case, we will be filtering out spans whose name is "/_healthz", typically associated with health check requests and usually are quite “noisy”.

Exercise
  • Inside the [WORKSHOP] directory, create a new subdirectory named 5-dropping-spans.
  • Next, copy all contents from the 4-resilience directory into 5-dropping-spans.
  • After copying, remove any *.out and *.log files.
  • Change all terminal windows to the [WORKSHOP]/5-dropping-spans directory.

Your updated directory structure will now look like this:

​
WORKSHOP
├── 1-agent
├── 2-gateway
├── 3-filelog
├── 4-resilience
├── 5-dropping-spans
│   ├───checkpoint-dir
│   ├── agent.yaml
│   ├── gateway.yaml
│   ├── log-gen.sh (or .ps1)
│   └── trace.json
└── otelcol

Next, we will configure the filter processor and the respective pipelines.