Description
Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
Description:
In high-traffic applications, the volume of spans created by the OpenTelemetry Java Agent can become costly to process and manage, particularly for messaging instrumentations (e.g., Kafka producer and consumer spans), which tend to generate a large number of spans.
While disabling the instrumentation entirely (via otel.instrumentation.[name].enabled=false) is possible, this also breaks context propagation — which is undesirable, as we still want trace context to propagate downstream.
As of now, I do not see a clear option to disable or suppress span creation at the instrumentation level while preserving context propagation.
Describe the solution you'd like
Introduce a per-instrumentation toggle such as:
otel.instrumentation.[instrumentation-name].experimental-span-suppression=true
(or an equivalent officially supported mechanism) to:
- Suppress the creation of spans for a specific instrumentation (e.g., Kafka producer/consumer),
- While still allowing trace context propagation (i.e., injection and extraction of context continues).
Describe alternatives you've considered
No response
Additional context
No response