Is there a way to get the agent to ignore /ping calls? Solutions suggested by AI don't seem to work

[nutmix]

our spring boot app /ping endpoint is called by the load balance health check every few minutes. This pollutes datadog, we see pages of /ping and dont see our actual api calls in the list of traces etc in the UI.
AI directed us to try several options, including:

-Ddd.trace.http.server.path-resource-name-mapping="/ping:"
-Ddd.trace.http.server.path-resource-name-mapping="/ping:ping"
-Ddd.trace.ignore.resource="/ping"
-Ddd.trace.ignore.resource=/ping
-Ddd.trace.ignore.resource="^/ping.*"
-Ddd.trace.ignore.resource="GET /ping"
-Ddd.trace.ignore.resource="GET /ping.*"
-Ddd.trace.ignore.resource=".*ping.*"
-Ddd.http.server.ignore-resources="/ping"
-Ddd.http.server.ignore-resources=/ping
-Ddd.trace.sampling.rules='[{"resource": "GET ping", "sample_rate": 0.0}]'  

this one was suggested by DD agent via chat, but breaks the java command line:
-Ddd.trace.sampling.rules=[{\"resource\":\"GET /ping\",\"sample_rate\":0.0}]

None of these seem to work to block /ping from the java agaent, and the last but one, which came from the dd documentation gives a json error.

There are some solutions posted which reference yml files, but as far as we can tell, yml files are not read or used by the java agent - its command line, env vars or code (we dont want to do it in code as we dont want to be dependent on the datadog jar)

NOTE: it is possible to block via the central forwarder, but this will do it for all services, not just the ones we want:

docker run -d --name central-forwarder  \
  -h myhost\
  -e DD_HOSTNAME=myhost \
  -e DD_API_KEY=xxx\
  :
  -e DD_APM_IGNORE_RESOURCES="GET /ping" \
  -e DD_DOGSTATSD_NON_LOCAL_TRAFFIC=true \
  -e DD_APM_NON_LOCAL_TRAFFIC=true \
datadog/agent:latest

Has anyone managed to block ping apis using the java agent?

DATADOG TRACER CONFIGURATION {"version":"1.54.0~20dac8a306","os_name":"Windows 11","os_version":"10.0","architecture":"amd64","lang":"jvm","lang_version":"21.0.3","jvm_vendor":"Azul Systems, Inc.","jvm_version":"21.0.3+9-LTS","java_class_version":"65.0","http_nonProxyHosts":"null","http_proxyHost":"null","enabled":true,"service":"xxx","agent_url":"http://localhost:8126","agent_error":false,"debug":false,"trace_propagation_style_extract":["datadog","tracecontext","baggage"],"trace_propagation_style_inject":["datadog","tracecontext","baggage"],"analytics_enabled":false,"priority_sampling_enabled":true,"logs_correlation_enabled":true,"profiling_enabled":false,"remote_config_enabled":true,"debugger_enabled":false,"debugger_exception_enabled":false,"debugger_span_origin_enabled":false,"debugger_distributed_debugger_enabled":false,"appsec_enabled":"ENABLED_INACTIVE","rasp_enabled":true,"telemetry_enabled":true,"telemetry_dependency_collection_enabled":true,"telemetry_log_collection_enabled":true,"dd_version":"6.6.6","health_checks_enabled":true,"configuration_file":"no config file present","runtime_id":"xxx","logging_settings":{"levelInBrackets":false,"dateTimeFormat":"'[dd.trace 'yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss:SSS Z']'","logFile":"System.err","configurationFile":"simplelogger.properties","showShortLogName":false,"showDateTime":true,"showLogName":true,"jsonEnabled":false,"showThreadName":true,"defaultLogLevel":"INFO","warnLevelString":"WARN","embedException":false},"cws_enabled":false,"cws_tls_refresh":5000,"datadog_profiler_enabled":false,"datadog_profiler_safe":true,"datadog_profiler_enabled_overridden":true,"data_streams_enabled":false}