Question: adjusting sampling at runtime?

[zmitchell]

Hi, I’m wondering if it’s possible to adjust the sampling at runtime. The use case would be to deploy a service with telemetry disabled, turn it on to investigate a customer reported issue, and then turn it back off after debugging. Is that possible?

[dgrr]

How are you currently sampling

[andylokandy]

In practice, it's usually recommended to propagate TraceContext from the client who controls whether the trace collection should be active. In the case where you need overriding over the client's TraceContext, you can hook the extraction of TraceContext, e.g,. with_span_context_extractor.

[zmitchell]

There may be a miscommunication. I'm the author of the application/client. I want to be able to toggle tracing on and off such that there's effectively no runtime cost when tracing is disabled, but I don't want it unconditionally disabled at compile time. I'm asking if that's possible currently.