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Features of the EDOT Java Agent

Elastic Stack Serverless Observability

The EDOT Java agent is a distribution of OpenTelemetry Java Instrumentation agent. It inherits all the features of the OpenTelemetry Java Instrumentation to capture logs, metrics, and traces.

The EDOT Java agent also provides:

In addition to the features listed, refer to Supported technologies.

The EDOT Java agent includes the following resource attributes providers from opentelemetry-java-contrib:

The EDOT Java agent includes the Inferred Spans Extension from opentelemetry-java-contrib. This extension provides the ability to enhance the traces by creating spans from async-profiler data without the need of explicit instrumentation of corresponding spans.

This feature is turned off by default and can be activated by setting OTEL_INFERRED_SPANS_ENABLED to true. Refer to Inferred-spans documentation for configuration options.

The EDOT Java agent includes the Span Stacktrace Extension from opentelemetry-java-contrib.

This feature is activated by default and allows to capture a stacktrace for spans that have a duration above a threshold. The OTEL_JAVA_EXPERIMENTAL_SPAN_STACKTRACE_MIN_DURATION configuration option, which defaults to 5ms, allows to configure the minimal duration threshold. A negative value turns off the feature.

Refer to span-stacktrace for configuration options.

Experimental runtime metrics are turned on by default.

Set OTEL_INSTRUMENTATION_RUNTIME_TELEMETRY_EMIT_EXPERIMENTAL_TELEMETRY to false to turn them off.

Elasticsearch and Kibana work best with metrics provided in delta-temporality. Therefore, the EDOT Java changes the default value of OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_METRICS_TEMPORALITY_PREFERENCE to DELTA. You can override this default if needed, though some provided Kibana dashboards will not work correctly if you do it.

Universal Profiling integration provides the ability to correlate traces with profiling data from the Elastic universal profiler. This feature is turned on by default on supported systems, and turned off otherwise.

Refer to universal-profiling-integration for details and configuration options.