I set spanNameOperator "!~" with a pattern and said it was verified. It
was not: I had checked that the option names exist in Grafana's bundle,
not that the behaviour was what I claimed, and then wrote that it was no
longer a supposition. It shipped a filter chip that hid nothing — the
panel reported "212 matches" with every middleware span still listed.
Reading the implementation: spanName is compared with an exact string
equality against operationName, so only "=" and "!=" against a single
literal name do anything. It is also pushed into the tag-filter list,
where "=~"/"!~" are honoured — but that matcher looks the key up among
the span's tags, and a span's name is not a tag, so the pattern matches
nothing and the negative filter passes everything.
So pattern-based exclusion is not available in this panel. Remove the
option rather than leave a chip that suggests filtering is happening, and
say so in the description, pointing at the built-in Critical path button
as the one lever that does narrow the view.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Stéphane Tailland
e6a3c53c8b