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Drop Filters - Trace Sampling

Trace Sampling lets you select which traces to index and monitor within your account, helping you focus on real-time events in your systems and services. Applying Drop Filters also optimizes quota usage by indexing only critical and actionable spans or full traces.

Trace Sampling overview​

The Sampling Rules screen includes the following:

  • Account Selection - Choose the Tracing accounts where you'd like to create and apply Drop Filters. Each account requires a separate set of rules.

  • Main Table - Displays your sampling rules, including descriptions and the services they apply to. If no services are listed, the rule applies to all spans.

Sampling rules overview

Create Custom Trace Sampling Rules​

tip

Creating individual rules for each tracing account allows for more precise span volume control.

To create a rule, click New Rule at the top right. Then, select the services where this rule will apply. To manually add services, check These Services and choose from the dropdown menu.

Sampling actions​

Each rule can have one of the following actions:

  • Keep a percentage of traces (choose a value from 1-100).
  • Keep traces slower than a specified duration (must exceed 1 ms).
  • Keep all traces with span errors to focus on identifying issues.

Create a sampling rule

While each rule can have only one action, you can create multiple rules for the same services. For example:

  • Sample all traces with spans containing errors.
  • Sample traces slower than 2000 ms.
  • Sample 50% of traces.
  • Sample all traces from a critical service.
Important

To activate the new set of rules, navigate to the YAML Configuration Generator and follow the instructions. Yaml configuration

Configure and apply Trace Sampling rules​

Start by creating your sampling rules for the chosen account.

Configure them using the OTEL Configuration Generator, which creates a YAML file for your collector to run the rules.

Access the generator by clicking the button at the top right or navigating to Tracing > OTEL configuration.

Select your configuration method based on your OTEL deployment strategy (currently supports Localhost; Docker and Kubernetes support is coming soon).

After selecting the Tracing account, follow the instructions to apply your rules to the collector.

Create a sampling rule