What Does "Dispatcher" do on NewRelic's @Trace Annotation

java, newrelic

Solution

Basically, `dispatcher=true` means "treat this method as the start of a request I want to monitor separately from my other types of requests".

From the documentation on monitoring Java background processes with New Relic:

The `dispatcher=true` option causes the annotated method to be treated like a web transaction--the agent will report errors and transaction traces for the task.

Set to `false`, the traced method will not be treated as a transaction itself, and will only show up in New Relic if it's called from a transaction already being reported.

Problem

What does the the `dispatcher` attribute of the `@Trace` annotation for New Relic do? All the examples I can find have it set to `true` - what happens if it is set to false?

Original source