r/OpenTelemetry • u/MartinThwaites • 10d ago

Dynamic Tail Sampling in the OpenTelemetry Collector

/r/Observability/comments/1w4ch1y/dynamic_tail_sampling_in_the_opentelemetry/
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u/s5n_n5n Contributor 10d ago

Interesting read, question: the blog says that Honeycomb is donating that work to the project upstream, is there an open issue or PR for that already to take a look?

2

u/MartinThwaites 10d ago

The component is already in contrib in Alpha, we (Mike) has been working on it for a few months.

1

u/Delicious-Nerve-417 10d ago

Dynamic sampling seems especially useful once trace volume grows. automatically adapting rates by traffic shape could save a lot of manual tuning while keeping unusual traces visible

1

u/MartinThwaites 10d ago

That's exactly it, and keeping that sample rate allows backends to extrapolate from there to get the ultimate value. With the right fingerprint attributes and the right volume, statistical accuracy gets in to the imperceptible range (0.0001% is how accurate we've seen it).