opencensus-specs

Sampling

This document is about the sampling bit, sampling decision, samplers and how and when OpenCensus samples traces. A sampled trace is one that gets exported via the configured exporters.

Sampling Bit (propagated via TraceOptions)

The Sampling bit is always set only at the start of a Span, using a Sampler

What kind of samplers does OpenCensus support?

• AlwaysSample - sampler that makes a “yes” decision every time.
• NeverSample - sampler that makes a “no” decision every time.
• Probability - sampler that tries to uniformly sample traces with a given probability. When applied to a child Span of a sampled parent Span, the child Span keeps the sampling decision.
• RateLimiting - sampler that tries to sample with a rate per time window (0.1 traces/second). When applied to a child Span of a sampled parent Span, the child Span keeps the sampling decision. For implementation details see this

How can users control the Sampler that is used for sampling?

There are 2 ways to control the Sampler used when the library samples:

• Controlling the global default Sampler via TraceConfig.
• Pass a specific Sampler when starting the Span (a.k.a. “span-scoped”).
  • For example AlwaysSample and NeverSample can be used to implement request-specific decisions such as those based on http paths.

When does OpenCensus sample traces?

The OpenCensus library samples based on the following rules:

1. If the span is a root Span, then a Sampler will be used to make the sampling decision:
   • If a “span-scoped” Sampler is provided, use it to determine the sampling decision.
   • Else use the global default Sampler to determine the sampling decision.
2. If the span is a child of a remote Span the sampling decision will be:
   • If a “span-scoped” Sampler is provided, use it to determine the sampling decision.
   • Else use the global default Sampler to determine the sampling decision.
3. If the span is a child of a local Span the sampling decision will be:
   • If a “span-scoped” Sampler is provided, use it to determine the sampling decision.
   • Else keep the sampling decision from the parent.

RateLimiting sampler implementation details

The problem we are trying to solve is:

1. Getting QPS based sampling.
2. Providing real sampling probabilities.
3. Minimal overhead.

Idea is to store the time that we last made a QPS based sampling decision in an atomic. Then we can use the elapsed time Z since the coin flip to weight our current coin flip. We choose our probability function P(Z) such that we get the desired sample QPS. We want P(Z) to be very cheap to compute.

Let X be the desired QPS. Let Z be the elapsed time since the last sampling decision in seconds.

P(Z) = min(Z * X, 1)

To see that this is approximately correct, consider the case where we have perfectly distributed time intervals. Specifically, let X = 1 and Z = 1/N. Then we would have N coin flips per second, each with probability 1/N, for an expectation of 1 sample per second.

This will under-sample: consider the case where X = 1 and Z alternates between 0.5 and 1.5. It is possible to get about 1 QPS by always sampling, but this algorithm only gets 0.75 QPS.

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