Provide mechanism to disable internal tracing

[sirianni]

The collector is consuming excessive memory from internal spans

For example, the httpcheckreceiver's otelhttp instrumentation is holding on to a decent chunk of memory for its span attributes

There doesn't appear to be any way to opt-out of this behavior

opentelemetry-collector/config/confighttp/confighttp.go

Lines 225 to 236 in 5309d60

	otelOpts := []otelhttp.Option{
	otelhttp.WithTracerProvider(settings.TracerProvider),
	otelhttp.WithPropagators(otel.GetTextMapPropagator()),
	}
	if settings.MetricsLevel >= configtelemetry.LevelDetailed {
	otelOpts = append(otelOpts, otelhttp.WithMeterProvider(settings.MeterProvider))
	}
	// wrapping http transport with otelhttp transport to enable otel instrumentation
	if settings.TracerProvider != nil && settings.MeterProvider != nil {
	clientTransport = otelhttp.NewTransport(clientTransport, otelOpts...)
	}

The collector's telemetry config does not expose options for configuring or disabling the TracerProvider.

There is a long-standing open issue #6629 to allow for exporting these internal spans. Perhaps providing a way to disable recording of these internal spans would be a simpler start.

[codeboten]

It's now possible to set the telemetry level to none for traces to use a no-op tracer provider. See #10858 for more details

[mx-psi]

Closing as completed per the last comment