> Traces need to be parsed in their entirety to do anything useful with them, making them impossible to stream. We started implementing distributed tracing usi

> Traces need to be parsed in their entirety to do anything useful with them, making them impossible to stream. We started implementing distributed tracing using the precursor to OpenTelemetry with the vendor Lightstep. They have a neat solution that allows streaming OTel spans: use large ring buffers to hold and analyze as many traces as you can afford. It finds relations between spans and surfaces interesting spans. This you run in your own cluster. Then that ships a subset of total spans and traces to their saas for a good UI. Unfortunately, at our scale, that was really expensive and we still had to resort to sampling.