Not able to see traces for MuleSoft Telemetry Exporter to Third-Party Monitoring Systems

When using the MuleSoft Telemetry Exporter to send OpenTelemetry (OTLP) data to third-party monitoring systems (e.g., Dynatrace, New Relic, Splunk), users may observe that traces do not appear consistently for every request. This often occurs even when the connection test to the third-party system is successful.

Cause: 

To ensure optimal performance and prevent the instrumentation of requests from impacting the health and availability of the Mule Runtime engine, MuleSoft applies a 10% default sampling rate for distributed tracing on Mule apps and APIs.

• How it works: For every 10 requests received by your application, only 1 (on average) is selected to have a trace generated and exported.

• Why it exists: Generating full spans and trace identifiers for 100% of traffic can increase CPU overhead and latency. The 10% threshold provides a statistically significant overview of application performance without compromising system stability.

Impact in Low-Traffic Environments

In Sandbox or non-production environments where testing is performed manually (e.g., via curl or Postman), the 10% sampling rate can make the integration appear non-functional or flaky. If you send 5 test requests, there is a high mathematical probability that none will be sampled and exported.