Posted On: May 15, 2023

Today, we are announcing the general availability of the tail sampling processor and the group-by-trace processor in the AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry (ADOT) collector. ADOT is a secure, production-ready, AWS supported distribution of the OpenTelemetry project. With this release, customers can use the ADOT collector for advanced distributed trace sampling use cases. 

Customers can now apply tail sampling for traces with the ADOT collector. Sampling of traces allows customers to control the volume of traces ingest in service such as AWS X-Ray and can help reduce costs. Tail sampling enables customers to make the sampling decision when all of the trace’s spans are completed. Due to this, customers can define sampling policies such as “ingest 100% of all error cases and 5% of all success cases”. With tail sampling, customers can achieve better collector load characteristics, induce lower compute resource usage, and reduce the costs of storing traces in a distributed tracing backend such as AWS X-Ray or Amazon OpenSearch.

You can configure and deploy the latest version of the ADOT collector for container services and Amazon EC2 by using AWS CloudFormation templates, the AWS Command Line Interface, kubectl commands, or the ADOT EKS add-on.
Visit our developer portal to learn more about ADOT and download the latest release.