The examples in this section assume that you already know how to initialise Scout in your Go applications. If you do not know how, or if you would like a refresher, click here.

Overview

Scout excels at collating information about the health and reliability of your applications, and having information is always a good thing. However, it is possible to become indundated by having too much information — so much information that actionable insights become hidden in a sea of noise and repetitive alerts. This is where sampling comes in.

Sampling enables you to decide what percentage of events Scout records and reports. If you had 10 users experience a specific error, say, it would not be particularly more helpful for Scout to report all ten instances of the same error. Taking a fraction of this number (which you can easily extrapolate to the thousands or tens of thousands of users you have) is much more efficient and ultimately lowers your usage bill.

Sampling Errors

The scout.WithSamplingRateMap function enables you to set a sampling rate for errors and traces (coming soon), specified as a percentage of events to be recorded. Its value should be a number between 0 (0%) and 1 (100%, inclusive). By default, the sampling rate is 1 (i.e all errors are reported).

func main() {
    scout.Init(
        // ...
        scout.WithSamplingRate(0.25),
    )
}

Sampling Metrics

The scout.WithMetricSamplingRate function enables you to set a sampling rate for metrics, specified as a percentage of events to be recorded. Its value should be a number between 0 (0%) and 1 (100%, inclusive). By default, the sampling rate is 1 (i.e all metrics are reported).

func main() {
    scout.Init(
        // ...
        scout.WithMetricSamplingRate(0.25),
    )
    defer scout.Stop()
}