Today we are introducing Local Tail-Based sampling in Kamon Telemetry! We are going to tell you all about it in a little bit but before that, let’s take a couple minutes to explore what is sampling, how it is used nowadays, and what motivated us to including local tail sampling in Kamon Telemetry.

After years of helping developers monitor and debug their production systems, we couldn’t help but notice a pattern across many of them: they roughly know that metrics and traces should help them get the answers they need, but they are unfamiliar with how metrics and traces work, and how they fit into the bigger observability world. This post is an introduction to how we see observability in practice, and a loose roadmap for exploring observability concepts in the posts to come.