Disable the openetelmetry exporter while still retaining trace and span handling

[sebastian-from-trivore]

Hi I have a issue very similar to @famod's question here on the related "Disable opentelemetry exporter in Quarkus 3.x" question by @fabrii.

In essence I want to disable the export of OTEL traces, but otherwise retain their generation and forwarding. I need to configure this behavior at runtime. I have played around with the configurations, for example setting quarkus.otel.traces.sampler.arg=0.0d but nothing seems to stick. It seems to me that all permutations either:

• retain the exporting behavior
• disable the support for tracing entirely

For background, I'm trying to deploy my stack in an environment where the exporting of traces is forbidden, but my application relies on the trace and span ids and their propagation among services as critical metadata (for logging purposes among other things).

I suppose this is a niche use case, but it seems very strange to me that there doesn't seem to be a way to achieve my goal using the plethora of existing configuration options. Am I missing something or is this really the case?

[quarkus-bot[bot]]

/cc @brunobat (opentelemetry), @radcortez (opentelemetry)

[brunobat]

@sebastian-from-trivore, I think this is possible by setting the exporter to none:
quarkus.otel.traces.exporter=none
Just sampling out will not work because sampling will also inhibit propagation.
See: https://quarkus.io/guides/opentelemetry#disable-all-or-parts-of-the-opentelemetry-extension