Sampling in Distributed Tracing

Abstract

Sampling is still one of the biggest challenges in distributed tracing. While the basic concept is easy to grasp, the number of choices and their trade-offs requires learning about the techniques and your own workload. In this session, we are giving you all the knowledge required to master the sampling techniques: we’ll talk about head and tail-based sampling, as well as adaptive sampling, and we’ll wrap it up with a bonus discussion on trace aggregation. You’ll leave this session ready to implement scenarios, from the simple “probabilistic head-sampling” up to the complex “scalable tail-based sampling” using open source tools like OpenTelemetry Collector.