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Sampling is when you select a few representative elements from a larger collection and extrapolate from the selected elements to learn about the larger collection. Head sampling and tail sampling are two different approaches to sampling your telemetry data. Data chosen by a sampler as representative of a data set is sampled data. Sampled data is processed and exported to Honeycomb. Unsampled data is not processed or exported.
How Honeycomb handles sampled dataHoneycomb adjusts for sample rate when working with and querying sampled data.

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Observability and Sampling

Sampling is crucial to observability at scale. You might sample your telemetry data to reduce your total data volume or filter out noise from services with predictable traffic. Consider these different kinds of traces:
  • Traces that finish successfully with no errors
  • Traces with specific attributes on them
  • Traces with high latency
  • Traces with errors on them
Most of your traces are probably the first kind: traces that finish successfully with no errors. These traces represent healthy behavior of your services and are required for comparisons with other kinds of traces. But you don’t need all of them, a sample of these traces is enough to understand the health of your system. The other kinds of traces are much more interesting. You might take larger samples, or even 100%, of these traces.

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Head Sampling

Head sampling is when you sample traces without looking at the entire trace. The decision to sample or not sample a span in a trace is made as early as possible. In OpenTelemetry, a head sampling decision is made during span creation: unsampled spans are not created. The most common form of head sampling is deterministic probability sampling. Given a constant sampling rate that represents a fixed percentage of traces to sample, the sampler will make a decision to sample or not sample spans based on using the trace ID as a random number. Using the trace ID allows disparate samplers to make consistent decisions for all of the spans in a trace. See our guidelines on when you should consider head sampling.

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OpenTelemetry SDK Support

The OpenTelemetry SDKs support deterministic probability sampling:

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Tail Sampling

Tail sampling is where the sampling decision considers all or most of the spans within the trace. Because tail sampling is done by inspecting whole traces, you can apply many different sampling techniques such as:
  • Dynamic sampling: By configuring a set of fields on a trace that make up a key, the sampler automatically increases or decreases the sampling rate based on how frequently each unique value of that key occurs. For example, a key made up of http.status_code will sample much less traffic for requests that return 200 than for requests that return 404.
  • Rules-based sampling: Define sampling rates for well-known conditions. For example, you can sample 100% of traces with an error and fall back to dynamic sampling for other traffic.
  • Throughput-based sampling: Sample traces based on a fixed upper bound on the number of spans per second.
  • Deterministic probability sampling - Although deterministic probability sampling is also used in head sampling, it is still possible to use it in tail sampling.
Honeycomb offers Refinery as a tail sampling solution to install in your environment. Tail sampling with Refinery lets you combine all of the above techniques to create a sampling strategy tailored to your needs. See our guidelines on when you should consider tail sampling.