Conditional Distributed Tracing

Distributed tracing is generally a binary affair—it’s off or on. Either a trace is sampled or, according to a flag, it’s not. Span placement is also assumed to be an “always-on” system where spans are always added if the trace is active. For general availability and service level objectives, this is usually good enough. But when we encounter problems, we need more. In this talk, we’ll show you how to “turn up the dial” with detailed diagnostic spans and span events that are inserted using dynamic conditions.