Unrecorded traces and spans are fully processed by the module

[manikmagar]

Module by default records 100% of the traces and spans. This may not be needed all the time and can be controlled with trace sampling.

It is possible to use Sampler properties of the OpenTelemetry SDK to configure Head Sampling with Consistent Probability Sampling.

If it is configured to use traceid ratio based sampling eg. otel.traces.sampler= parentbased_traceidratio, otel.traces.sampler.arg=0.1, SDK will only record 01 i.e. 10% of the traces. Although 90% of the traces are not recorded, this module is still performing a full processing of trace and span data for unrecorded traces. This is an un-necessary overhead and must be avoided.

When using head sampling, the recording decision is made when starting a span. So it should be using to decided if further processing of any related spans and traces are needed or not. Honoring the recording flags can help reduce the processing load and improve the performance, if needed.