Disable tracing

[bjor-joh]

Is there a way to disable tracing completely and only use Beyla to instrument metrics and expose them with a prometheus endpoint?

[marctc]

Hey @bjor-joh, did you look at our docs? Did you have difficulties to find an aswer for that?
You can configure prometheus in the prometheus_exporter detailed here: https://grafana.com/docs/beyla/latest/configure/options/#prometheus-http-endpoint

[bjor-joh]

So enabling the prometheus exporter is fine and works like a charm.

But is there a way to disable tracing and only generate metrics?

[bjor-joh]

There seems to be some setting here but I can't find it in the docs.

Would settings this to empty like '' work? I basically want the inverse of *

[marctc]

Tracing is disabled if you don't enable explicitly. Where are you seeing traces only using prometheus?

[marctc]

https://github.com/grafana/beyla/blob/main/pkg/export/otel/traces.go#L104 if you are curious

[bjor-joh]

OK, maybe it is disabled then.

I was confused when I saw these messages at startup.

beyla time=2024-11-15T09:31:43.018Z level=INFO msg="Kernel in lockdown mode, missing CAP_SYS_ADMIN or older than 5.17, trace info propagation in gRPC headers is disabled." component=grpc.Tracer                                                                                                                                                                                     
beyla time=2024-11-15T09:31:43.126Z level=INFO msg="trace context propagation disabled due to missing capability CAP_SYS_ADMIN" component=grpc.Tracer                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 
 beyla time=2024-11-15T09:31:56.325Z level=INFO msg="instrumenting process" component=discover.TraceAttacher cmd=/bin/busybox pid=3966134         

[marctc]

Oh I see...sorry about that confusion, but internally there's also the term tracer (and therefore trace) for BPF components that trace the execution of HTTP/GRPC requests.

[bjor-joh]

Ok, gotcha. Thanks for the explanation, and quick help.