What will happen if both of manual instrumentation and automatic instrumentation exist in same java process?

[aaron-ai]

Whether they can be remain independent of each other ?

[jkwatson]

moving this over to the instrumentation repo

[trask]

hi @aaron-ai! the javaagent will hijack the GlobalOpenTelemetry and then all of your manual instrumentation (that uses GlobalOpenTelemetry) will interop with the agent instrumentation

[aaron-ai]

Thanks for your reply!! so they can remain independent if I use OpenTelemetrySdk.builder() to build my own OpenTelemetrySdk rather than using GlobalOpenTelemetry directly, am I right?

[mateuszrzeszutek]

Not exactly -- the agent also hijacks Context static methods, e.g. Context#current() (Span#current() is affected by that too). You might still get some interference even if you use your own OpenTelemetrySdk instance.

You can disable the opentelemetry-api and opentelemetry-instrumentation-api instrumentations to completely turn off the OpenTelemetry API bridging. This way, the agent won't interfere with your app's copy of OpenTelemetry API & SDK in any way.