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Status Delivered
Workspace Instana
Categories Other Tracers
Created by Guest
Created on Jul 29, 2022

Don't aggregate different SQL statements or always do it in the same way

A part of my application makes a series of SQL calls (4 inserts and 2 updates, on different tables). I want to monitor how many times the first of these calls is made (or the whole series, it's equivalent) for business and application performance purposes. However the calls are sometimes auto-aggregated (https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/instana-observability/current?topic=applications-analyzing-traces-calls#automatic-aggregation-of-short-exit-calls) and sometimes not. Therefore if I make a graph counting the SQL call I'm interested in, one call to my web service sometimes appears as one SQL call and sometimes as 6: the numbers are meaningless!

Ideally, for my purpose, the calls should not be aggregated, so I can count only the one I'm interested in.

However I see in the help that aggregation occurs based on "High frequent and repetitive access patterns of similar type". The calls made by my app are indeed always the same 6 statements on the same tables (with different data). If Instana recognizes this and groups them, it could be fine if they were always grouped. Then the count would be consistently inflated 6 times and the graph would be perfectly readable. Or if Instana recognized that the pattern was always the same if could then show it in full in the traces even with some data dropped.

Idea priority Medium
  • Guest
    Reply
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    Sep 14, 2022

    Yes, in this case it should not be a problem.

  • Guest
    Reply
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    Sep 14, 2022

    When you say "per trace", that means for a single call to a given endpoint?

    Currently I've seen batches of up to 6 SQL statements and traces with like a dozen mongo or sql statements. Small enough in your opinion?

  • Guest
    Reply
    |
    Sep 14, 2022

    A restart should be enough.

    I do not see it would greatly impact application performance. But if you have huge amount of sql statement per trace, then you might want to try it on your test environment first.

  • Guest
    Reply
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    Sep 14, 2022

    Thank you. With a restart we don't need to wait 10 minutes, correct?

    Is there a chance that this would impact application performance? Would you say that this warrants performance testing?

  • Guest
    Reply
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    Sep 14, 2022

    Hi, the option to disable span batching for Java is released, here is the instruction:

    Disabling batching

    Span batching can be disabled with the below configuration

    com.instana.plugin.javatrace:
    instrumentation:
    spanBatchingEnabled: false

    This configuration needs a restart of the application or a complete reset of monitored applications in Agent(Agent need to be shut down for >10 minutes)

  • Guest
    Reply
    |
    Sep 7, 2022

    Yes, our app is a Java Spring Boot app accessing a MongoDB and an Oracle SQL databases. If there is a way to disable the aggregation in our case, I'd appreciate it.

  • Guest
    Reply
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    Sep 1, 2022

    Thanks for reaching out. Could you share which environment/language you are using? We do have certain features to disable such aggregation.