Question 1

Does my trace data leave my computer?

Accepted Answer

No. The estimator reads the file in your browser. Trace payloads are not uploaded.

Question 2

Do I need to connect my observability account?

Accepted Answer

No. Use an OTLP JSON trace sample and enter your monthly tracing bill. Sieve does not connect to or change your Datadog, Honeycomb, or New Relic account.

Question 3

How accurate is the savings estimate?

Accepted Answer

It applies the sample's retained span ratio to your bill and assumes kept and dropped spans have similar average ingested size. Actual byte volume, traffic mix, and vendor billing rules can change the result.

Question 4

Can I deploy the generated YAML as-is?

Accepted Answer

Use it as a starting point. Check compatibility against your Collector release and validate it with representative traffic in staging. In a multi-replica setup, route every trace's spans to the same Collector instance, usually with trace-ID-aware load balancing.

Question 5

What data formats work?

Accepted Answer

OTLP JSON, Zipkin v2 JSON, trace arrays, and newline-delimited JSON span records with trace IDs, timestamps, status, and attributes.