Lightstep is closed source. They have opensource libraries that get data into the system (like the go one you linked to) but to actually use it you need the hosted service.

I hope to be releasing an open-source version of that approach in the next several months.

@necubi I do not disagree with you about the value of tail-based sampling. It has been an item on Jaeger roadmap from day one, but never of high enough priority to implement it. We're planning to do a POC by the end of this year. Jaeger's agent-based architecture was specifically designed to support that use case. If you're interested in collaborating on that, it would be great (https://github.com/uber/jaeger/issues/425).

Having said that, Dapper-style tracing systems with head-based sampling still provide enormous benefits that are often underestimated. In fact, even if we support tail-based sampling in the future, we're still going to run a certain portion of the traffic through probabilistic, head-based sampling, because it allows to reason about statistical patterns observed in the systems at large scale.

Thanks, please do. :)

100% agree with what necubi said. I work at LightStep and it's great to see OSS implementations coming out. The creators of LightStep actually are also the creators of Dapper haha.

LightStep specifically is meant for large-scale enterprise deployments and their specific needs and has focused on that for now.