Distributed Trace Sampling Savings Calculator
Observability bills explode when every request is traced. Enter your current full-fidelity spend, the percentage of traces you plan to keep, and the share of dropped traffic you expect to replay on demand. The output shows the new monthly bill, hard-dollar savings, annual runway unlocked, and how much trace data you are still retaining for investigations.
Actual billing depends on vendor-specific storage tiers, retention periods, and ingest multipliers. Validate assumptions with your observability provider before modifying sampling rules.
Examples
- $120,000 monthly baseline, 20% sample rate, 10% replay ⇒ Sampled monthly bill: $26,400.00 USD • Monthly savings: $93,600.00 USD • Annual savings runway: $1,123,200.00 USD • Effective trace retention: 22.00% • Storage reduction versus full fidelity: 78.00%
- $60,000 baseline, 50% sample rate, no replays ⇒ Sampled monthly bill: $30,000.00 USD • Monthly savings: $30,000.00 USD • Annual savings runway: $360,000.00 USD • Effective trace retention: 50.00% • Storage reduction versus full fidelity: 50.00%
FAQ
What if my vendor charges higher rates for replays?
Increase the baseline monthly cost before sampling or add the surcharge to your replay percentage calculation to stay conservative.
Can I include log or metric costs?
This tool isolates distributed trace volume. For blended observability budgets, run the calculator on the trace slice only or apportion your total bill accordingly.
How low can I set the sample rate?
Production SRE teams often stay above 5% so that latency percentiles stay trustworthy. Entering 1% or less is allowed here but may not meet your SLO coverage.
Additional Information
- Effective retention equals the sample rate plus any replayed fraction of the traces you initially dropped.
- Replay percentage assumes that on-demand rehydration is billed at the same unit rate as ingesting traces live.
- Storage reduction highlights how much less persistent data you keep compared with the full-fidelity baseline.