refinery

"Better" is always "for what metric" but if nothing else having the source code to the stack is always "better" IMHO even if one doesn't choose to self-host, and that goes double for SigNoz choosing a permissive license, so one doesn't have to get lawyers involved to run it --- While digging into Honeycomb's open source story, I did find these two awesome toys, one relevant to the otel discussion and one just neato https://github.com/honeycombio/refinery (Apache 2) -- Refinery is a tail-based sampling proxy and operates at the level of an entire trace. Refinery examines whole traces and intelligently applies sampling decisions to each trace. These decisions determine whether to keep or drop the trace data in the sampled data forwarded to Honeycomb. https://github.com/honeycombio/gritql (MIT) -- GritQL is a declarative query language for s

I'm not aware of tail-based (i.e., gathering a batch of logs and sampling the group coherently), but some of the sampling techniques mentioned in the post are absolutely used for structured logging systems. At least with Honeycomb, for logs unassociated with traces, you can use dynamic sampling[0] to significantly cut down on total event volume and bake in good representivity. And when you have logs correlated with traces, like how OTel does it, you can sample all logs correlated to a trace when that trace is also sampled[1]. We've at least also been doing some thinking about what batching up and coherently sampling "likely related but not correlated by ID" groups of logs. It's definitely in the realm of doable and TBH I find it a little strange that people haven't sought these kinds of solutions at large yet. I think most folks still jus