Easy way to disable selected instrumentations?

[gao-artur]

We can disable the whole OTel using an environment variable OTEL_SDK_DISABLED=true. But is there an easy built-in solution to disable selected instrumentations using environment variables or another configuration source? For example, I have the following setup:

services.AddOpenTelemetryTracing(builder => builder
    .SetResourceBuilder(ResourceBuilder
        .CreateDefault()
        .AddService(
            _hostEnvironment.ApplicationName,
            serviceVersion: typeof(Startup).Assembly.GetName().Version?.ToString()))
    .AddOtlpExporter()
    .AddAspNetCoreInstrumentation()
    .AddHttpClientInstrumentation()
    .AddGrpcClientInstrumentation(options => options.SuppressDownstreamInstrumentation = true)
    .AddElasticsearchClientInstrumentation(options => options.SuppressDownstreamInstrumentation = true)
    .AddEntityFrameworkCoreInstrumentation());

And I want to be able to disable the Elasticsearch and EF Core instrumentations.

[Kielek]

You could try to use Automatic Instrumentation: https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-dotnet-instrumentation
There is no feature to disable instrumentation by env. vars. when you set up it programmatically.

More info under: https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-dotnet-instrumentation/blob/main/docs/config.md#instrumentations

[gao-artur]

The docs say automatic instrumentation is in the early stages of development. I'd prefer to avoid using it in production before a stable version is released.

[julealgon]

We can disable the whole OTel using an environment variable OTEL_SDK_DISABLED=true.

This is not correct, at least not yet:

• Support for OTEL_SDK_DISABLED  #4155