Enable OpenTelemetry in prod with sampling#1985
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We want to sample based on the trace ID by picking the percentage of traces to sample (Head Sampling). We expect we generate a small amount of data such that we could collect all of it without sampling. However, we want to be cautious in case collecting the data has an impact on e.g. the latency of our services. We have opted for Head Sampling because it's easy to understand and configure, and it will allow us to determine whether we need to manage the data volume. More specifically, we chose "parentbased_traceidratio" to respect the parent span's sampling decision (https://opentelemetry.io/docs/specs/otel/trace/sdk/#parentbased) For more info: https://opentelemetry.io/docs/concepts/sampling/
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theseanything
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Feb 16, 2026
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What problem does this pull request solve?
This PR enables OpenTelemetry in production.
We want to sample based on the trace ID by picking the percentage of traces to sample (Head Sampling).
We expect we generate a small amount of data such that we could collect all of it without sampling. However, we want to be cautious in case collecting the data has an impact on e.g. the latency of our services.
We have opted for Head Sampling because it's easy to understand and configure, and it will allow us to determine whether we need to manage the data volume.
For more info: https://opentelemetry.io/docs/concepts/sampling/
Trello card:
Things to consider when reviewing
I've tried the sampling in Staging by setting the ratio to 0.1 and checking that only 1 out of 10 requests make it through to AWS Xray
Reminders
If you've made changes to the deployer role (files in
modules/deployer-access):make <environment> forms/account applyon the relevant environments (dev,staging,user-research, and/orprod)apply-forms-terraform-<environment>pipelines have run successfully