Tracing · inspectIT Ocelot Documentation

This section provides all the information on trace collection with inspectIT Ocelot.

The inspectIT Ocelot configuration has a master switch for tracing, which can be used to completely disable anything that has to do with trace collection and exporting. Tracing in the agent can be completely disabled by setting the inspectit.tracing.enabled property to false. This way any default inspectIT setting or anything else defined for trace collection will be overruled. If used, the switch makes sure that the inspectIT Ocelot agent:

disables all trace exporters
removes tracing from all instrumentation rules

Global Sampling Rate

It is possible to globally regulate the number of traces generated through sampling. You can configure the probability with which a trace ends up being collected via inspectit.tracing.sampleProbability. E.g. setting the value to 0.1 will result in only 10% of all traces being collected. By default, the sample probability is 100%. Note that this global setting only acts as a default value and can be overridden by individual rules.

Common Tags as Attributes

Globally defined common tags used when recording metrics can also be inserted as attributes in traces. The property inspectit.tracing.add-common-tags defines the behavior of this feature. Available options are:

NEVER - Never add common tags as attributes to spans.
ON_GLOBAL_ROOT - Add common tags only to a global span root. Thus, only to the first span of each trace.
ON_LOCAL_ROOT (default) - Add common tags to local span roots. If a trace spans over several JVMs, then attributes will be set on the first span of each JVM.
ALWAYS - Add common tags as attributes to all spans.

Trace Correlation and Distributed Tracing

The inspectIT Ocelot agent supports out-of-the-box distributed tracing, which allows traces to be correlated across multiple components to trace the entire flow through a system. By default, the agent supports correlating a communication via HTTP and JMS. To achieve this, correlation information is exchanged during the communication (for example by injecting additional headers into requests), for which the B3 Propagation format is used by default.

If you want to use the agent together with other components that also perform distributed tracing but do not support the correlation information in B3 format, this can be adjusted with the following configuration:

inspectit:
  tracing:
    propagation-format: B3 # the format for propagating correlation headers

Currently the following formats are supported for sending correlation information:

Property	Format	Description
`B3` (default)	B3 Propagation	B3 Propagation used by, e.g. Zipkin.
`TRACE_CONTEXT`	W3C Trace Context	Standard headers and a value format to propagate context information.
`DATADOG`	Datadog Format	Headers used by Datadog for context correlation.

important

It is important to note that this configuration refers to the format of the correlation information used to send this data. When processing correlation information that the agent receives, it automatically uses the correct format.