Support filtering traces by request path

[DamianEdwards]

Discussed in #1390

^{Originally posted by Kralizek December 14, 2023}
My ASP.NET Core app with Razor Pages emits traces for static content. Is it possible to specify paths that should be ignored?

I also get traces for requests originated by the AWS SSM configuration provider.

Ideally, I'd love the traces to be less noisy:

• only user initiated
• avoid static content

Some screenshots:

[davidfowl]

Shouldn't this be a generic filter based on span properties?

[DamianEdwards]

Shouldn't this be a generic filter based on span properties?

Maybe, but exposing a first-class UI ability to filter by incoming request path built on top of a generic filter would likely be useful.

[davidfowl]

I don't think we should do that. These are spans (activities), not requests.

[DamianEdwards]

Yes understood. What is the span-centric way of describing what's being shown? Is it just the display name or is the dashboard special-casing different span types and extracting specific info. for display here?

[davidfowl]

I think the span name for requests happens to be the same as the path but we want filtering based on span attributes:

[samsp-msft]

Are you asking to filter the requests in the UI, or suppress them being sent based on the type of the request. The latter is possible though the OTEL APIs to create a sampler that can work at the head or tail level.

https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-dotnet/tree/main/docs/trace/tail-based-sampling-span-level

[davidfowl]

Filter in the UI