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Tune distributed trace sampling without going blind when the incident lands

How to audit SDK head sampling, move decisions into the Collector, and keep slow and error traces without blowing up cost.

A practical guide to spotting sampling bias, applying useful tail sampling, and validating that the traces you care about still survive the full path.

Created: April 28, 2026

Published: April 28, 2026

Estimated time45 min

LevelAdvanced

Before you startAccess to the OpenTelemetry Collector or equivalent collector receiving traces

PlatformsLinux / Docker

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Docker

Useful when the collector runs in a container and the fastest diagnosis path is to inspect the process locally.

dockerAccess to the collector containercurl or wget inside the container

Inspect container environment variables

docker exec otel-collector printenv | egrep 'OTEL_TRACES_SAMPLER|OTEL_TRACES_SAMPLER_ARG'

Check collector internal metrics

docker exec otel-collector sh -c "wget -qO- http://localhost:8888/metrics | egrep 'tail_sampling|queue_size|accepted_spans'"

Also available inAjustar sampling distribuido sin quedarte ciego cuando llega el incidente

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