Drop Spans Shorter than threshold

[hugosantosred]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
We are running a custom integration for an ERP Application with the Python APM Agent.

The problem is that some of the transactions are really long and are composed of thousands of spans, and we are facing problems to view the slow spans, the ones that really matters for us, without configuring ELASTIC_APM_TRANSACTION_MAX_SPANS with a larger number.

Describe the solution you'd like

Instead of that we want an option to configure the min duration of an span for be captured, something like the ELASTIC_APM_SPAN_FRAMES_MIN_DURATION option but for SPANS itself and if the SPAN is not longer than the duration configured it not be captured and no count as SPAN for the ELASTIC_APM_TRANSACTION_MAX_SPANS option configured number, sending only those longer spans.

[beniwohli]

Hi @hugosantosred

Thanks for opening this issue! One way to achieve this could be to use a processor function that checks the duration field and returns False if it is below a certain threshold. Would that be a good solution for you?

/edit: sorry, I overlooked the issue with TRANSACTION_MAX_SPANS, that wouldn't be solved by a processor :(. I'll get back to you!

[beniwohli]

@hugosantosred turns out there is a cross-agent effort to introduce a setting for this, you can read more here: elastic/apm#259.

I can't give you a timeline yet when we will be able to introduce this, as there are a couple of high priority tasks on our platter.

[hugosantosred]

@beniwohli Thanks for all the help!

I'm going to subscribe to elastic/apm#259 to be aware of any changes on this.