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by hinkley 735 days ago
I was underwhelmed by the max size for spans before they get rejected. Our app was about an order of magnitude too complex for OTEL to handle.

Reworking our code to support spans made our stack traces harder to read and in the end we turned the whole thing off anyway. Worse than doing nothing.

2 comments

As per the spec there's no formal limits on size, although in practice there can be in several levels:

- Your SDK's exporter

- Collector processors and general memory limitations based on deployment

- Telemetry backend (this is usually the one that hits people)

Do you know where the source of this rejection happened? My guess would be backend, since some will (surprisingly) have rather small limits on spans and span attributes.

Sounds like a knob you can turn, from my practice at least.