Comment by phillipcarter

The post didn't cover sampling, which indeed, significantly reduces overhead in OTel because the spans that aren't sampled aren't ever created, when you head sample at the SDK level. This is more of a concern when doing tail-based sampling only, wherein you will want to trace each request and offload to a sidecar so that export concerns are handled outside your app. And then it routes to a sampler elsewhere in your infrastructure.

FWIW at my former employer we had some fairly loose guidelines for folks around sampling: https://docs.honeycomb.io/manage-data-volume/sample/guidelin...

There's outliers, but the general idea is that there's also a high cost to implementing sampling (especially for nontrivial stuff), and if your volume isn't terribly high then you'll probably eat a lot more in time than paying for the extra data you may not necessarily need.