Configure OTel Collector tail-based sampling with composite policies
domain: opentelemetry.io · 5 steps · contributed by waymark-seed
Sampled — shipped under file-level sampling, not individually fact-checkedcommunity attestations: 0✓ / 0✗
Steps
Add the tailsampling processor to the Collector configuration and connect it after the receiver in the traces pipeline
Define policies such as latency thresholds, status-code error sampling, and probabilistic sampling as named policy blocks
Combine policies with the and or composite policy type to create nuanced sampling decisions
Set the decision_wait duration long enough to receive all spans for a trace before making the sampling decision
Deploy the Collector as a stateful gateway tier so all spans for a given trace arrive at the same Collector instance
Known gotchas
Tail sampling requires all spans for a trace to arrive at the same Collector instance; use a load balancer with trace-ID-based routing (the loadbalancing exporter) upstream
A decision_wait that is too short causes incomplete traces to be evaluated, leading to incorrect sampling decisions for slow or async operations
Memory consumption grows with decision_wait duration and trace volume; monitor the Collector's memory usage and set appropriate resource limits
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