palantir / palantir/tracing-java

Support undecided observability state

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#32 4 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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enhancement
Dominant language
Java
Stars
28
Forks
20
Avg merge
1d 8h
Merged PRs (30d)
15

Description

The default sampler should not cause a local service to observe operations, but it should also not prevent upstream tracing-aware services from recording trace data based on their local sampler configuration. This requires samplers to support an additional undecided state in addition to observed, and not observed.

In practice this should prevent the X-B3-Sampled from being set on outgoing requests.

Contributor guide

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First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start by locating the sampler state definitions and the code that sets the X-B3-Sampled header on outgoing requests. Trace how the default sampler and upstream tracing-aware services use these values. Done means samplers support observed, not observed, and undecided states, with undecided preventing the outgoing header from being set while preserving upstream sampling decisions.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
java
Domain
observability
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
35/100

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