# X-Ray High Sampling Rate > X-Ray charges $5 per million traces recorded, and a fixed sampling rate above 10% with no reservoir records far more than debugging needs. ZopNight computes the delta from reducing to the 5% AWS default against the account's measured monthly trace volume. Both inputs are required, or it abstains. Source: https://zop.dev/integrations/aws/recommendations/x-ray-high-sampling-rate Updated: 2026-08-19 --- ## Observability priced by the trace Tracing feels free until volume arrives: at [$5.00 per million recorded traces](https://aws.amazon.com/xray/pricing/), a high-throughput account sampling every third request records tens of millions of traces monthly for a bill nobody scrutinises. Sampling exists precisely because a representative fraction answers the same questions (latency distributions, dependency maps, error localisation) that exhaustive recording answers, at a twentieth of the cost. ## The delta model, with both variables measured The recommendation quantifies one move: reducing the configured fixed rate to 5%, AWS's own default sampling rate. Reduced volume scales proportionally (target rate over current rate), and the saving is the trace-count difference times the per-million price. Both variables must be real: the configured rate comes from the account's discovered sampling configuration, and the monthly volume from the trace-count series measured over at least 30 days; X-Ray publishes that series only when group-level metrics are enabled. Missing rate, missing volume, or thin coverage each abstain; the only fixed input is X-Ray's published price, which is a rate card, not an estimate. ## Account-scoped on purpose X-Ray sampling rules match by service and host *patterns*, frequently a bare wildcard, so a high rate is not a property of any one instance or function; it applies account-and-region wide. The finding is therefore raised at the account grain, one per affected region, rather than scattered across every workload the rule happens to touch. ## Read your sampling configuration ```bash aws xray get-sampling-rules \ --query 'SamplingRuleRecords[].SamplingRule.[RuleName,FixedRate,ReservoirSize,Priority]' \ --output table ``` A FixedRate above 0.10 with no meaningful reservoir is the shape this rule prices. ## Reduce without losing the traces that matter Drop the fixed rate to about 5% and add a small reservoir of 1 request per second, so low-traffic services keep a floor of representative traces. Then protect the exception: keep a separate higher-priority rule sampling error and fault responses at 100%, because failure investigations want every bad trace and the bad traces are, by definition, rare. Watch recorded volume for a day and tune from measurement, which is the same standard the rule holds itself to.