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Status Future consideration
Workspace Instana
Categories Tracing
Created by Guest
Created on Sep 15, 2025

RELATED IDEAS

Reducing data load by optimazing JVM StackTrace storage

Data load is ending into high costs for Instana customers, and probably for Instana itself. Analyzing the root cause of these big ammounts of data sent to the backend, we have realized that JVM's stack-traces are big chunks of data, which are mainly identic copies ones from the others. In our concrete case, a few of our applications are handling kafka topics, at the rate of millions per hour, and each topic is handled at the same point of the code, generating the same and identical stack trace, which is sent to the Instana backend, increasing our budget.


Once the problem is stated, the proposal is to analyze from this point of view, and check if there is any way to optimize the storage, in the sense that stack traces could be identified in a let-say master table, and stored once (or a few times, but not always), reducing the whole size of the stored data. Let me add up that the technique for performing this optimization is up to you, and my intention is to mere expose the current problem and the benefit of aproving this idea. My calculations lead to a reduction of 75% or 80% in data size, in case of this to be performed.


Thanks for reading and analyzing.

Idea priority High
  • Admin
    Prashant Raj Singh
    Nov 7, 2025

    Hi @Guest

    Thank you for the detailed proposal. Instana already focuses on limiting stack trace capture primarily to error scenarios, which significantly reduces data volume for high-throughput, non-error paths. Additional optimizations such as deduplicating identical error stack traces would require deeper architectural changes across ingestion and storage layers and are therefore being tagged for future consideration.

    I am attaching the configuration below:

    Agent via configuration.yaml that doesn’t needs application restart:

    com.instana.tracing:
      stack.filter.error.enabled: true

    Environment Variable

    1. export INSTANA_TRACING_STACK_FILTER_ERROR_ENABLED=true

    2. It needs application restart

    3. The variable should be created where the application is running

    System property

    -Dcom.instana.tracing.stack.filter.error.enabled=true

    To use system property the customer must add this argument when he starts the application, like $ java -Dcom.instana.tracing.stack.filter.error.enabled=true -jar application.jar

    Needs restart the application to add the new property as argument

    Reply

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