Sampling Strategies for Traces
Understand why traces are sampled, the difference between head-based and tail-based sampling, and how to balance visibility against cost.
Why Sample Traces?
Capturing every trace in a busy system produces enormous data volumes. Sampling keeps a representative subset to control storage and processing cost while preserving useful insight.
The Cost of Full Tracing
A service handling thousands of requests per second can emit millions of spans per minute. Storing all of them is expensive and rarely necessary for diagnosis.
- Network overhead
- Backend storage
- Query latency
All lessons in this course
- Understanding Trace Spans and IDs
- How Distributed Tracing Works
- Tracing vs. Logging vs. Metrics
- Sampling Strategies for Traces