Why don't X-Ray traces always contain all the subsegments, queries, and other service calls?

Question

I've noticed that if I select an arbitrary trace it may or may not have all the segments of that trace.  I can check some traces and they'll have some queries or subsegments when others will have a different set.  There doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to what's included and what's not as far as I can tell.

Is this intended behaviour?  What's the benefit of having incomplete data on any given trace when trying to find out where the problems are? And if it is intended, is there any way it can be changed so that I maybe get less traces in total but the data within the trace is more complete?

Answer

If the application is owned by user, users can precisely control the information they want to generate by configuration and code changes, please refer to dev guide https://aws-otel.github.io/docs/introduction

But if the trace is generated from AWS managed services, user can only enable or disable the tracing since the tracing code is owned by AWS services. We would like to provide more configuration options to user for better user experiences if it is feasible, please give more details requirements, we are glad to hear your opinion.

Why don't X-Ray traces always contain all the subsegments, queries, and other service calls?

Relevant content