Trying to ingore OPTIONS http method

Elastic Observability APM
1

Kibana version: 8.6.2

Elasticsearch version: 8.6.2

APM Server version: 8.6.2

APM Agent language and version: Java Agent v1.52.1

Hello Folks.

I'd like to know, if it's possible in java agent arguments, remove the preflight OPTIONS calls to API. I mean, the browser preflight OPTIONS call.

Some application has many 'OPTIONS unknown route' calls in you trace and this calls mask the APM values. I tried to use de transaction_ignore_urls with regex, only to test, but as I thought, it didn't work.

My question is: is it possible to ignore OPTIONS methods with a config in the Java agent? Do I need to change the APM query to ignore them?

The goal here is to ignore them in the Java agent to avoid code changes.

options-call-1
options-call-11574×252 18.4 KB

optsion-call-2
optsion-call-21864×112 6.43 KB

Regards.

2

It's not clear to me where these transactions are coming from, could you explain the scenario here?

3

Sure!

I'm experiencing "an issue" with CORS preflight requests from our frontend to the backend API. The browser sends an OPTIONS request before the actual API call.

For reasons I have not yet determined, we are seeing a very high volume of these OPTIONS requests, as I described in the previous thread.

My concern is about the 'OPTIONS unknown route' trace. I don't understand why these calls appear in APM and what the source of the problem might be (if it is, in fact, a problem).

A direct consequence is that these requests are triggering false positive high-throughput alerts in our monitoring system.

I'm trying to replicate and solve this on a legacy application running on an older JVM. Below is the full configuration I'm using for the Elastic APM Java agent.

    -Delastic.apm.service_name=api
    -Delastic.apm.server_urls=https://apm.local
    -Delastic.apm.secret_token=nonononono
    -Delastic.apm.environment=production
    -Delastic.apm.application_packages=com.myself
    -Delastic.apm.include_process_args=false
    -Delastic.apm.start_async=true
    -Delastic.apm.delay_agent_premain_ms=240000
    -Delastic.apm.capture_headers=true
    -Delastic.apm.use_path_as_transaction_name=false
    -Delastic.apm.transaction_ignore_urls=/metrics,/prometheus,*/metrics,*/health,*/health/*,*/prometheus,*/prometheus/*,*/actuator,*/actuator/*,*/alive,*/alive/*,.*/OPTIONS.*,.*_method=OPTIONS.*,.*\?.*OPTIONS.*
    -Delastic.apm.use_jaxrs_path_as_transaction_name=true
    -Delastic.apm.circuit_breaker_enabled=true
    -Delastic.apm.max_queue_size=128
    -Delastic.apm.api_request_time=10s
    -Delastic.apm.server_timeout=5s
    -Delastic.apm.classes_excluded_from_instrumentation=org.jboss.*,org.wildfly.*,io.undertow.*,com.fasterxml.jackson.*,org.hibernate.validator.*,javax.validation.*
    -Delastic.apm.disable_instrumentations=reactor,spring-webflux,spring-webclient,springwebclient
    -Delastic.apm.span_compression_enabled=true
    -Delastic.apm.enable_type_pool_cache=true
    -Delastic.apm.central_config=false
    -Delastic.apm.log_level=ERROR
    -Delastic.apm.span_stack_trace_min_duration=5000ms
    -Delastic.apm.stack_trace_limit=25
    -Delastic.apm.transaction_max_spans=300
    -Delastic.apm.transaction_sample_rate=1.0
    -Delastic.apm.span_min_duration=100ms
    -Delastic.apm.exit_span_min_duration=100ms
    -Delastic.apm.trace_methods_duration_threshold=150ms
    -Delastic.apm.use_elastic_traceparent_header=false
    -Delastic.apm.disable_outgoing_tracecontext_headers=true

This is the browser call:

options-call-3
options-call-31966×114 16.1 KB

What is causing the traces to appear as 'OPTIONS unknown route'? Is there a way to fix this? For example, is there a specific setting in the agent configuration that can prevent these traces from being captured?

4

what do you get when you set use_path_as_transaction_name=true

5

Hello Jack, Sorry for the delay.

I'll test this argument and get back to you with the results as soon as possible.

6

Hello Jack, sorry for the delay.

I ran into some issues that kept me from doing the test earlier. Everything is working fine now.

Thanks again for your help.

Have a nice week.