Status: Development Overview Sampling is an important lever to reduce the costs associated with collecting and processing telemetry data. It enables you to choose a representative set of items from an overall population. There are two key aspects for sampling of tracing data. The first is that sampling decisions can be made independently for each span in a trace. The second is that sampling decisions can be made at multiple points in the telemetry pipeline. For example, the sampling decision for a span at span creation time could have been to keep that span, while the downstream sampling decision for the same span at a later stage (say in an external process in the data collection pipeline) could be to drop it.