Control trace volume with OpenTelemetry tail-based sampling
OpenTelemetry (OTel) tail-based sampling helps teams control trace volume by retaining errors, slow requests, and other traces worth investigating while dropping lower-value traffic. In distributed systems, a single request can fan out across many services, each emitting spans. That volume adds up quickly. Some applications produce millions of traces per hour, while large clusters generate more than 10 billion spans per day.