Manage service tracing across hosts with Single Step Instrumentation rules

Datadog's Single Step Instrumentation (SSI) automatically instruments all services on a host, but teams often need finer control over which services generate traces. Instrumentation rules let you define conditions based on process attributes (working directory, executable, runtime language, OS) to either allow or block tracing for specific services. Rules can be deployed centrally via Remote Configuration without SSH access or redeployment, or exported as config files for stricter change-control environments. This allows teams to exclude noisy workloads like batch jobs and cron tasks from tracing, reducing unnecessary trace volume and cost while keeping full instrumentation for critical services.