What is the correct way to turn off the metrics export ?

[ashutoshraina]

Is there a flag to turn off the metrics export from the agent and only have the traces exported ? I looked on the readme but I could not find a property in the OTEL resource attributes.

[iNikem]

One way of doing that is just configuring exporter that does not do metrics. E.g. otlp_span

[ashutoshraina]

I haven't integrated with the SDK, so there is no exporter within the application. How does one do that with the agent ?

[trask]

hey @ashutoshraina, check out https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-java-instrumentation#exporters

[ashutoshraina]

I have the following variables exported.

export OTEL_EXPORTER=otlp
export OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT=localhost:55680 # the collector is running here
export OTEL_RESOURCE_ATTRIBUTES=service.name=myservice

The variables are picked up correctly since I can see the traces on the collector side with the service name set correctly as well.

The agent using the OTLP exporter still tries to export the metrics, I would like to stop that. Is there a way to stop the metrics export ?

[opentelemetry.auto.trace 2021-01-29 16:44:20:108 -0800] [grpc-default-executor-0] WARN io.opentelemetry.exporter.otlp.metrics.OtlpGrpcMetricExporter - Failed to export metrics
io.grpc.StatusRuntimeException: UNIMPLEMENTED: unknown service opentelemetry.proto.collector.metrics.v1.MetricsService
        at io.grpc.Status.asRuntimeException(Status.java:533)
        at io.grpc.stub.ClientCalls$UnaryStreamToFuture.onClose(ClientCalls.java:533)
        at io.grpc.internal.DelayedClientCall$DelayedListener$3.run(DelayedClientCall.java:464)
        at io.grpc.internal.DelayedClientCall$DelayedListener.delayOrExecute(DelayedClientCall.java:428)
        at io.grpc.internal.DelayedClientCall$DelayedListener.onClose(DelayedClientCall.java:461)
        at io.grpc.internal.ClientCallImpl.closeObserver(ClientCallImpl.java:617)
        at io.grpc.internal.ClientCallImpl.access$300(ClientCallImpl.java:70)
        at io.grpc.internal.ClientCallImpl$ClientStreamListenerImpl$1StreamClosed.runInternal(ClientCallImpl.java:803)
        at io.grpc.internal.ClientCallImpl$ClientStreamListenerImpl$1StreamClosed.runInContext(ClientCallImpl.java:782)
        at io.grpc.internal.ContextRunnable.run(ContextRunnable.java:37)
        at io.grpc.internal.SerializingExecutor.run(SerializingExecutor.java:123)
        at java.base/java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor.runWorker(ThreadPoolExecutor.java:1128)
        at java.base/java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor$Worker.run(ThreadPoolExecutor.java:628)
        at java.base/java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:834)

[anuraaga]

Hi @ashutoshraina - you can use OTEL_EXPORTER=otlp_span to only enable trace export. However the next version will be changing variables around a bit - you will want to use OTEL_METRICS_EXPORTER=none when updating.