Get started with Adaptive Traces

Enable Adaptive Traces and create your initial sampling policies.

Adaptive Traces helps you cost-effectively collect and retain the traces that matter most by combining a probabilistic sampling rate with automatic keep rules for errors, slow traces, and anomalies.

When you select a starting configuration and create policies, you are specifying which traces to keep. Adaptive Traces automatically sets up:

a probabilistic sampling rule
keep rules (unless custom options override them)
the policy structure needed for ongoing sampling decisions

These policies become the foundation for collecting, analyzing, and troubleshooting trace data in Grafana Cloud.

Get started with Adaptive Traces

To get started with Adaptive Traces, complete the following steps.

Navigate to Adaptive Telemetry > Adaptive Traces.
Review the onboarding panel, which helps you choose how many traces to keep as your starting point.
Choose how many traces to keep
Adaptive Traces provides three options to help you get started:
Recommended — 5% A balanced starting point that keeps critical traces:
- keep error traces
- keep slow traces
- keep anomaly-related traces
Keep more traces — 25% Use this if you want a less aggressive sampling policy while still prioritizing key traces:
- keep error traces
- keep slow traces
- keep anomaly-related traces
Custom Set your own sampling percentage and optionally include:
- status code (error) keep policies
- latency keep policies
Choose the option that best matches your workload and visibility needs.
Create your policies
After selecting a sampling option, click Create policies.
Adaptive Traces automatically sets up:
- a probabilistic sampling policy
- keep rules for errors, slow traces, and anomalies (unless you customize otherwise)
This creates the foundational configuration for collecting and evaluating traces.
You can edit or add policies at any time.

Next steps

After your policies are created:

Open the Policies section.
Verify that the probabilistic, status code, and latency policies have been created.
Monitor your incoming traces to ensure your sampling level aligns with expectations.

You can also modify existing policies or create additional ones.