Misleading documentation on `sampled` parameter

[Walther]

Thanks for the useful library! 🧡

The documentation for Span describes the sampled parameter as follows:

sampled (Optional[bool]) – Whether the span should be sampled. Overrides the default sampling decision for this span when provided.

However, it appears that this cannot be used at runtime to skip specific child spans from being reported inside a transaction that is sampled. There was a feature request for this here #1895 and it was closed as not planned.

Additionally, it looks like with the project POTel the plan is to remove the sampled parameter altogether: #4200

Would it be possible to update the documentation to reflect the current (and future) state? Thanks!

[Walther]

Linking this as tangentially related - for a similar user need, but with a different approach #3859

[antonpirker]

Hey @Walther thanks for bringing this up.

Yes, the Python SDK laks some functionality here, that Javascript has already implemented. We currently work on moving away from sending a transaction with all its spans at once to sentry (what we do now) to sending spans in batches, even if the transaction as a whole is not yet finished.

This is why sampling/filtering spans is not yet working (the sampled parameter in the span is due to Span being the base class of a Transaction and currently only sampling of Transactions work.)

But we will get there soon, we will update this issue if we have some progress!