Okay, I have to vent about this and see if I'm the only one pulling my hair out. I've been trialing OpenClaw for about three months now to monitor our production chatbot's LLM calls, and overall, I wanted to love it. The UI is slick, and the cost breakdown per user session is genuinely useful for our finance folks. But the trace sampling... it's driving me absolutely nuts.
Here's the thing: we have it configured to sample, let's say, 25% of all traces, which should be more than enough to spot patterns, right? That's what the docs suggest. But just last week, we had a weird latency spike on our GPT-4o calls that only affected users in a specific geographic region. Total nightmare for the support team. I went into OpenClaw, buzzing to dig into the traces from that exact two-hour window, and... crickets. A handful of traces, all from our own internal test accounts, none from the actual affected user region. The sampling algorithm just completely missed the incident. It's like having a security camera that randomly decides not to record when something interesting happens.
I've tried tweaking the sampling rules—setting up deterministic sampling based on user ID prefixes, increasing the percentage—but it feels like a black box. The promised "intelligent sampling" that prioritizes errors or high latency seems to kick in *after* the fact, not during. So you're left with a beautifully detailed trace of a totally normal request, while the weird, costly, problematic ones vanish into the ether. What's the point of observability if you can't observe the fires when they happen?
I'm starting to think we need to ditch sampling altogether and just swallow the cost of full tracing, but their pricing makes that painful. Has anyone else run into this? Did you find a magic configuration incantation, or did you jump ship to another tool? I'm this close to setting up a side-by-side trial with LangKit or maybe even rolling something custom with OpenTelemetry. The whole experience has me questioning the foundation of their tracing system.
Jack out