HTTP configuration options

For transactions that are HTTP requests, the agent can optionally capture the request body, e.g., POST variables. If the request has a body and this setting is disabled, the body will be shown as [REDACTED]. This option is case-insensitive.

Possible options are off, errors, transactions and all:

This setting can be changed after the agent starts.

Configures the content types to be captured.

This option supports the wildcard *, which matches zero or more characters. Examples: /foo/*/bar/*/baz*, *foo*. Matching is case insensitive.

This setting can be changed after the agent starts.

If set to true, the agent will capture request and response headers, including cookies.

Valid options: continue, restart, restart_external.

The traceparent header of requests that are traced by the Elastic APM .NET Agent might have been added by a 3rd party component.

This situation becomes more and more common as the w3c trace context gets adopted. In such cases you may end up with traces where part of the trace is outside of Elastic APM.

In order to handle this properly, the agent offers trace continuation strategies with the following values and behavior:

This is used to restrict requests to certain URLs from being instrumented.

This property should be set to a comma separated string containing one or more paths.

For example, in order to ignore the URLs /foo and /bar, set the configuration value to "/foo,/bar".

When an incoming HTTP request is detected, its request path will be tested against each element in this list. For example, adding /home/index to this list would match and remove instrumentation from the following URLs:

https://www.mycoolsite.com/home/index
http://localhost/home/index
http://whatever.com/home/index?value1=123

In other words, the matching always happens based on the request path—hosts and query strings are ignored.

This option supports the wildcard *, which matches zero or more characters. Examples: "/foo/*/bar/*/baz*, *foo*". Matching is case insensitive by default. Prepending an element with (?-i) makes the matching case sensitive.

With this option, you can group transaction names that contain dynamic parts with a wildcard expression. For example, the pattern GET /user/*/cart would consolidate transactions, such as GET /users/42/cart and GET /users/73/cart into a single transaction name GET /users/*/cart, hence reducing the transaction name cardinality.

This option supports the wildcard *, which matches zero or more characters. Examples: GET /foo/*/bar/*/baz*`, *foo*. Matching is case insensitive by default. Prepending an element with (?-i) makes the matching case sensitive.

To enable distributed tracing, the agent adds trace context headers to outgoing HTTP requests made with the HttpClient type. These headers (traceparent and tracestate) are defined in the W3C Trace Context specification.

When this setting is true, the agent also adds the header elasticapm-traceparent for backwards compatibility with older versions of Elastic APM agents. Versions prior to 1.3.0 only read the elasticapm-traceparent header.

If set to true, transaction names of unsupported or partially-supported frameworks will be in the form of $method $path instead of just $method unknown route.

Set this property to true when requests made by the APM agent should, if requested by the server, be authenticated using the credentials of the currently logged on user.

This is useful when using windows authentication on a proxy, that routes APM agent requests to the APM server.

Controls which baggage values are automatically attached to the given event (transaction, span, error). Baggage values are derived from the baggage header defined in the W3C Baggage specification. You can programmatically write and read baggage values via the Activity API. For more details, see our documentation on how to integrate with OpenTelemetry.

The agent uses the W3C Trace Context specification and standards for distributed tracing. The traceparent header from the W3C Trace Context specification defines a sampled flag which is propagated from a caller service to a callee service, and determines whether a trace is sampled in the callee service. The default behavior of the agent honors the sampled flag value and behaves accordingly.

There may be cases where you wish to change the default behavior of the agent with respect to the sampled flag. By setting the TraceContextIgnoreSampled configuration value to true, the agent ignores the sampled flag of the W3C Trace Context traceparent header when it has a value of false and and there is no agent specific tracestate header value present. In ignoring the sampled flag, the agent makes a sampling decision based on the sample rate. This can be useful when a caller service always sets a sampled flag value of false, that results in the agent never sampling any transactions.