Tracing attributes: the politeness budget

OpenTelemetry makes it easy to attach everything to a span. That convenience becomes a storage problem within weeks. Our Distributed Tracing workshop gives each team an attribute budget worksheet before they touch code. We rehearse tail sampling misses with real-ish shapes: checkout spikes, cron storms, and mis-tagged health checks. Learners defend their sampling decisions to a mentor playing skeptical SRE. The tone stays technical—no promises about miraculous visibility gains. The closing paragraph is a limitation disclosure: we do not cover browser RUM stitching. Backend cohorts wanted depth over breadth, so we kept the boundary crisp.