create a config that allows to exclude spans from transactions

There are cases where our users are interested in exclude certain spans from a transaction.

In order to achieve that we are going to create a new configuration named ignoreSpans. It will work the same way as ignoreTransactions config

[kyungeunni]

Hi @xirdneh! Thanks for your interest!!

Yes, for the time being you might consider using addFilter API to filter out spans you’d like to exclude. I think the example shown in the link might give you an idea of how to access the transactions and spans, but here’s the pseudo-code to demonstrate how you could manipulate the payload:

apm.addFilter(function (payload) {
  if (payload.errors) {
    payload.errors.forEach(function (error) {
      error.exception.message = error.exception.message.replace('secret', '[REDACTED]')
    })
  }
  if (payload.transactions) {
    payload.transactions.forEach(function (tr) {
      const filteredSpans = tr.spans.filter(span => shouldIncludeSpan);
      tr.spans = filteresSpans;
    })
  }
  return payload
})
...
function shouldIncludeSpan(span) {
    // some logic to filter span
    return true;
}

I will also keep you updated with the progress on the ignoreSpans . Thanks!!

[xirdneh]

@kyungeunni Thanks, this works great!

for future references it would be great if spans had attributes to know if it’s an HTTP request span and to easily grab the HTTP verb and URL. This would make it easier to filter out the unwanted spans. For now we had to do something like this to figure out if a span was an HTTP request and which URL it is using:

    apmClient.addFilter((payload) => {
      if (!payload.transactions) return payload;
      payload.transactions.forEach((transaction) => {
        const filteredSpans = transaction.spans.filter((span) => {
          const spanNameParts = span.name.split(' ');
          const url = spanNameParts.find((part) => part.startsWith('https://'));
          if (!url) return span;
          const spanUrl = new URL(url);
          if (!hostnamesToExclude.includes(spanUrl.hostname)) return span;
        });
        transaction.spans = filteredSpans;
      });
      return payload;
    });