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+---
+title:  "Adding Jaeger remote sampler using custom env var"
+date:   2023-12-28
+tags:
+  - programming
+  - monitoring
+  - golang
+---
+
+### Background
+
+The [opentelemetry go sdk does not support Jaeger remote sampler](https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-go/blob/e3bf787c217c0dcc6c4fb0111318ca8f1790a157/sdk/trace/sampler_env.go#L29-L34)
+via the environment variable even though it is one of the
+[known samplers](https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specification/blob/24740fdd83ad4256d6cdb585c2d04b601d82322f/specification/configuration/sdk-environment-variables.md?plain=1#L111-L119).
+That is because the Jaeger remote sampler is in the
+[go-contrib](https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-go-contrib/blob/a001fcc76ce2798dbbf8290ab557840ba2b65f7d/samplers/jaegerremote/sampler_remote.go)
+repo instead. If we try to setup the Jaeger remote sampler via environment variable
+`OTEL_TRACES_SAMPLER="jaeger_remote"` it will result in the error `unsupported sampler: jaeger_remote` printed
+to `stdout`, yet it is not a fatal error. Here, we look at a simple setup which will allow us to initialize
+the Jaeger remote sampler via environment variable which allows instrumentation to be changed via a central
+location via say the [opentelemetry operator](https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-operator).
+
+### The rundown
+
+Let's start by laying down the foundations.  The most basic setup does not require anything but
+generally speaking it is better to manually set the service name and version rather than rely
+on environment variables. Using the resource, we can setup a new tracer to replace the default
+global tracer. At this point, the tracer can be updated with environment variables! For example,
+`OTEL_TRACES_SAMPLER=traceidratio` and `OTEL_TRACES_SAMPLER_ARG=0.5` would lead to a sampler with
+50% sampling on the trace id being initialized since nothing has been defined. Our goal is to
+leverage the same semantics with the jaeger remote sampler. Our goal here is un-comment out the line
+which adds the jaeger remote sampler to the trace provider.
+
+```golang
+import (
+    "go.opentelemetry.io/otel"
+    "go.opentelemetry.io/otel/sdk/resource"
+	sdktrace "go.opentelemetry.io/otel/sdk/trace"
+    semconv "go.opentelemetry.io/otel/semconv/v1.21.0"
+)
+
+func main() {
+	res :=  resource.NewWithAttributes(semconv.SchemaURL,
+                semconv.ServiceName("some-name"),
+                semconv.ServiceVersion("some-version"),
+            ))
+    tracerProvider := sdktrace.NewTracerProvider(
+    	sdktrace.WithResource(res)),
+        // sdktrace.WithSampler(NewJaegerRemoteSampler("jaeger-remote")),
+    )
+    otel.SetTracerProvider(tracerProvider)
+}
+```
+
+First, we need the ability to identify and parse the 3 arguments allowed for the jaeger remote sampler:
+* endpoint — endpoint (url without the path) where the jaeger remote config can be read
+* pollingIntervalMs — frequency of polling the remote endpoint
+* initialSamplingRate — the default sampling percentage if the remote cannot be read
+
+then assuming that we have indeed parsed the arguments into a variable of `map[string]string`
+the jaeger remote sampler can be constructed as
+
+```golang
+import "go.opentelemetry.io/contrib/samplers/jaegerremote"
+
+func createJaegerSampleWithArgs(serviceName string, args map[string]string) tracesdk.Sampler {
+	var opt []jaegerremote.Option
+	// the default sampling percentage if the args cannot be read from environment
+	fraction := 0.25
+	if endpoint, ok := args["endpoint"]; ok {
+		opt = append(opt, jaegerremote.WithSamplingServerURL(endpoint))
+	}
+	if interval, ok := args["pollingIntervalMs"]; ok {
+		if n, err := strconv.Atoi(interval); err == nil {
+			opt = append(opt, jaegerremote.WithSamplingRefreshInterval(time.Duration(n)*time.Millisecond))
+		}
+	}
+	if ratio, ok := args["initialSamplingRate"]; ok {
+		if s, err := strconv.ParseFloat(ratio, 64); err == nil {
+			fraction = s
+		}
+	}
+	opt = append(opt, jaegerremote.WithInitialSampler(tracesdk.TraceIDRatioBased(fraction)))
+	return jaegerremote.New(serviceName, opt...)
+}
+```
+
+and the sampler created as below.  Note that we need to separate the functions so since all the base
+samplers can be prepended with `parentbased_` in the otel semantic and will use the upstream trace
+state to make a sampling decision. One unfortunate aspect is that the constants `tracesSamplerKey`
+and `tracesSamplerArgKey` are not exported in the go-sdk, which means that we have to redefine
+those two constants ourselves. We have also made the assumption that a function `parseJaegerRemoteEnvArgs`
+exists somewhere that can parse the args correctly (some combination of splitting `,` and `=`).
+
+```golang
+const (
+    tracesSamplerKey               = "OTEL_TRACES_SAMPLER"
+    tracesSamplerArgKey            = "OTEL_TRACES_SAMPLER_ARG"
+	// custom definition for jaeger
+    samplerJaegerRemote            = "jaeger_remote"
+    samplerParentBasedJaegerRemote = "parentbased_jaeger_remote"
+)
+func NewJaegerRemoteSampler(serviceName string) tracesdk.Sampler {
+	sampler, ok := os.LookupEnv(tracesSamplerKey)
+	if !ok { return nil }
+
+	sampler = strings.ToLower(strings.TrimSpace(sampler))
+	samplerArg, _ := os.LookupEnv(tracesSamplerArgKey)
+	samplerArg = strings.TrimSpace(samplerArg)
+
+	jaegerRemoteSampler := createJaegerSampleWithArgs(serviceName, parseJaegerRemoteEnvArgs(samplerArg))
+	switch sampler {
+	case samplerJaegerRemote:
+		return jaegerRemoteSampler
+	case samplerParentBasedJaegerRemote:
+		return tracesdk.ParentBased(jaegerRemoteSampler)
+	default:
+		return nil
+	}
+}
+```
+
+Another caveat is that using the same env var as the base sdk will result in seeing
+`unsupported sampler: jaeger_remote` printed out to the console every time the sampler is initialized.
+For anyone without the context, this line may seem like a misconfiguration and therefore we may consider
+changing the key to something different such as `tracesSamplerKey="OTEL_TRACES_SAMPLER_CUSTOM"`
+(probably unnatural when using with the otel operator). Similarly,
+we may consider passing in a logger to the function `NewJaegerRemoteSampler` or add a couple of `fmt` in
+before the return statements to signify what type sampler has been initialized.