Support for excluding SQL statements from being captured

[tobiasstadler]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

• We are using a connection pool when accessing our SQL database(s). On checkout we validate that the connection is (still) ok. As each validation sends a query to the database, each validation creates a span. So the validation creates many not so usefully spans which we want to get rid of.
• Some of our applications use transactions, sometimes even involving multiple databases. We also want to get rid of the resulting PREPARE AND COMMIT spans.

We hope to reduce the pressure on our APM servers by not sending these spans to them.

Describe the solution you'd like I would like to have the possibility to ignore certain SQL statements from being captured. Basic wildcard matching would be sufficient for us. I already implemented a (JDBC only) solution for the Java agent: elastic/apm-agent-java#2293.

Describe alternatives you've considered Right now we are dropping the spans when ingesting the events in Elasticsearch.

[felixbarny]

We don't have support for it in the Java agent yet, but do you think span compression could be an alternative to reduce the load?

[tobiasstadler]

Yes, because it will reduce the number of "SELECT", "PREPARE", "COMMIT" spans, but no as it it will most probably combine spans which I don't want to be combined.

I will give it a shot once it is released in the Java agent, but I still think I want to control what spans are discarded.