Open Source Summit Europe 2024

Is Distributed Tracing an observability essential or just a high-maintenance diva? Hardly, anyone wants to compromise on a trace. For an adventure, try tracing everything and watch your cloud bill explode. Yes! All those spans that you decide to keep are expensive. If you use an external APM provider, god help you before you break your bank. While tracing has solved a number of problems, the cost problem is genuine and it keeps increasing with scale. In this presentation, Prashansa narrates her experiences when she was trying to balance the costs while keeping the traces sane. It’s a humorous journey lined with some failed experiments, small peaks of joy, troughs of sorrow and finally tumbling upon a good enough solution. Join her to know how you can also maintain good and sane enough tracing with a manageable bill, with some span tweaking magic, custom sampling algorithm and fully utilising OpenTelemetry capabilities. Trace smarter to save better.