Mint: Cost-Efficient Tracing with All Requests Collection via Commonality and Variability Analysis
Haiyu Huang, Cheng Chen, Kunyi Chen, Pengfei Chen, Guangba Yu, Zilong He, Yilun Wang, Huxing Zhang, Qi Zhou · 2025
Distributed traces contain valuable information but are often massive in volume, posing a core challenge in tracing framework design: balancing the tradeoff between preserving essential trace information and reducing trace volume. To address this tradeoff, previous approaches typically used a '1 or 0' sampling strategy: retaining sampled traces while completely discarding unsampled ones. However, based on an empirical study on real-world production traces, we discover that the '1 or 0' strategy actually fails to effectively balance this tradeoff.