Do not use null parent context on tomcat advice

[amarziali]

What Does This Do

HttpServerDecorator is doing a couple of actions concerning the inferred proxy spans that assumes that the parent context used to extract this information is not null but actually the tomcat 5.5 instrumentation passes a null context

java.lang.NullPointerException
  at gateway.InferredProxySpan.fromContext(InferredProxySpan.java:65)
  at decorator.HttpServerDecorator.registerServiceEntrySpanInInferredProxy(HttpServerDecorator.java:218)
  at decorator.HttpServerDecorator.startSpan(HttpServerDecorator.java:181)

Motivation

Additional Notes

Contributor Checklist

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Jira ticket: [PROJ-IDENT]

[jandro996]

LGTM! Thanks for the fix

[chatgpt-codex-connector]

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Reviewed commit: e10a139f87

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[amarziali]

@codex review

[datadog-prod-us1-6]

More details

The PR correctly guards against null parentContext when accessing inferred proxy span operations. The original code would NPE when parentContext was null because InferredProxySpan.fromContext(parentContext) calls .get() on a null object. The fix wraps the two affected operations in an if (parentContext != null) check and handles the null case in the return statement by returning the span directly (AgentSpan extends Context, so it's type-safe). This is a focused defensive programming fix that resolves a real production crash with no unintended side effects.

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[chatgpt-codex-connector]

💡 Codex Review

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Reviewed commit: 0ee35f5166

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[amarziali]

@codex review

[chatgpt-codex-connector]

Codex Review: Didn't find any major issues. 🎉

Reviewed commit: be05cbf09a

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[dd-octo-sts]

🟢 Java Benchmark SLOs — All performance SLOs passed

Suite	Status
Startup	🟢 pass

SLO thresholds are defined here based on automatically generated metrics. A warning is raised when results are within 5% of the threshold.

PR vs. master results

Scenario	Candidate	master	Δ (95% CI of mean)
startup:insecure-bank:iast:Agent	13.97 s	14.01 s	[-1.0%; +0.3%] (no difference)
startup:insecure-bank:tracing:Agent	12.97 s	13.01 s	[-1.0%; +0.4%] (no difference)
startup:petclinic:appsec:Agent	16.87 s	16.56 s	[+0.7%; +3.0%] (maybe worse)
startup:petclinic:iast:Agent	16.93 s	16.88 s	[-0.4%; +1.0%] (no difference)
startup:petclinic:profiling:Agent	16.78 s	16.77 s	[-1.3%; +1.5%] (no difference)
startup:petclinic:sca:Agent	16.87 s	16.75 s	[-0.4%; +1.8%] (no difference)
startup:petclinic:tracing:Agent	16.03 s	16.12 s	[-1.5%; +0.4%] (no difference)

Commit: ad0cff3d · CI Pipeline · Benchmarking Platform UI

---

Load and DaCapo benchmarks can be triggered manually in the GitLab pipeline. Results will appear in the Benchmarking Platform UI after completion.

[jandro996]

The fix itself looks solid (defense in depth: normalizing parentContext to root() at the top of startSpan, plus a null-tolerant fromContext). One request before merging: add a regression test.

[PerfectSlayer]

I don't think this is the right wait to fix the issue. Added a comment about it

[amarziali]

@codex review

[chatgpt-codex-connector]

Codex Review: Didn't find any major issues. Breezy!

Reviewed commit: ad0cff3df2

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[jandro996]

Good catch on the real root cause, much cleaner fix. Since this was a production NPE, could you add a small regression test for it? Even a unit test on ServiceAdvice.onService with a non-Context attribute would do.

[PerfectSlayer]

Thanks for the follow up change

[dd-octo-sts]

/merge

[gh-worker-devflow-routing-ef8351]

View all feedbacks in Devflow UI.

2026-07-16 10:30:57 UTC ℹ️ Start processing command /merge

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2026-07-16 10:31:01 UTC ℹ️ MergeQueue: pull request added to the queue

The expected merge time in master is approximately 2h (p90).

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2026-07-16 11:35:21 UTC ℹ️ MergeQueue: This merge request was merged