---
title: "Adaptive Traces | Grafana Cloud documentation"
description: "Learn about the key benefits and features of Adaptive Traces"
---

# Adaptive Traces

Adaptive Traces helps you automatically identify and retain your most valuable traces, so that you can get the insights you need into application performance and availability, while optimizing your overall observability costs.

* * *

## Overview

In complex systems, where requests traverse multiple services, distributed tracing constructs traces that reveal the path and timing of each request, making them invaluable for pinpointing bottlenecks and interconnection issues. While full tracing provides comprehensive data, healthy applications with consistently successful requests generate a massive volume of unnecessary traces.

Adaptive Traces addresses this by employing tail sampling, a technique that delays the sampling decision until a complete trace is collected. This allows for informed choices, prioritizing critical traces, such as those with errors or high latency, by evaluating the full request context.

With Adaptive Traces, you define policies to control data ingestion, combining rules like `ingest traces with ERROR status from service X` or `capture 5% of traces from service Y.` This tailored approach ensures cost-effective debugging of production issues by focusing on the most relevant traces.

## Why use Adaptive Traces?

- Manage via Grafana Cloud: handles the complexities of large-scale tail sampling, providing a managed solution with 10-second policy updates, without the operational overhead of a centralized pipeline
- Optimize data: save on ingest costs
- Improve performance: less data needs to be processed, transmitted, and queried
- Reduce toil: customizable rules to ingest only traces of value

## Explore

[Introduction  
\
Learn more about the fundamentals and available features that help you optimize your use of Adaptive Traces.](/docs/grafana-cloud/cost-management-and-billing/adaptive-telemetry/adaptive-traces/introduction/)

[Get started  
\
Enable Adaptive Traces and create your initial sampling policies.](/docs/grafana-cloud/adaptive-telemetry/adaptive-traces/get-started/)

[Review and manage recommendations  
\
Filter, review, and edit recommendations to suit your needs.](/docs/grafana-cloud/cost-management-and-billing/adaptive-telemetry/adaptive-traces/manage-recommendations/)

[Create policies  
\
Create, view, and edit policies to define a set of criteria that evaluates traces and decides which to keep (sample) or not keep (not sampled, or drop).](/docs/grafana-cloud/cost-management-and-billing/adaptive-telemetry/adaptive-traces/create-policies/)

[Monitor  
\
Compare your trace data before and after enabling Adaptive Traces.](/docs/grafana-cloud/cost-management-and-billing/adaptive-telemetry/adaptive-traces/monitor/)

[Additional configuration  
\
Configure role-based access control and other settings for Adaptive Traces.](/docs/grafana-cloud/adaptive-telemetry/adaptive-traces/additional-configuration/)

[Guides  
\
Best practices, example policies, and troubleshooting scenarios for Adaptive Traces.](/docs/grafana-cloud/adaptive-telemetry/adaptive-traces/guides/)

[Manage as code  
\
Manage your Adaptive Traces configuration at scale using the HTTP API.](/docs/grafana-cloud/adaptive-telemetry/adaptive-traces/manage-as-code/)

[Reference  
\
View reference-level documentation for the various parts of Adaptive Traces.](/docs/grafana-cloud/cost-management-and-billing/adaptive-telemetry/adaptive-traces/reference/)