Filtering or changing user metadata with Java agent

Elastic Observability APM
1

Hi!

I am using the apm Java agent attached to a Spring application without any custom spans or transactions.
Is it possible to change or filter out the user metadata? Metadata | APM Overview [7.15] | Elastic
The user.name field get's populated automatically, but I don't want to store that value. Santize configuration is not helpful here unfortunately.

2

Technically you could set -Duser.name=something but the user.name is used extensively within applications as well as the agent, for example to determine the home directory and which user is running the process, so I suspect it would break things. You could post-facto sanitize the value held in the elastic database, eg regularly running a batch "anonymizing" procedure?

3

Thanks for the response.

In my case the user.name field seems to be populated from Spring context (and is set to the name of user with active session), the -Duser.name flag doesn't seem to have any effect on that.

The transaction API has a setUser method, but I don't think I can use it together with attached agent, right?

4

setUser() should work, it shouldn't matter how the agent is started

5

I'd recommend removing the user name with an ingest node pipeline.

See Data security | APM User Guide [7.16] | Elastic

6

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