3. Dropping Spans

5 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 that contain "/_healthz", typically associated with health check requests and usually are quite “noisy”.

Exercise

Important

Change ALL terminal windows to the 3-dropping-spans directory and run the clear command.

Copy *.yaml from the 2-building-resilience directory into 3-dropping-spans. Your updated directory structure will now look like this:

.
├── agent.yaml
└── gateway.yaml

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