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Every Adora plan comes with a monthly session cap — the number of sessions your plan includes each billing period. Sampling is how Adora decides which sessions to record so that coverage is spread evenly across the whole month, rather than being used up in the first few days. This page explains why Adora samples sessions, how it works, and what it means for the data you see.

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Why not record everything?

Recording, storing and processing sessions costs resources, and plans are priced around a monthly session cap. If Adora recorded every single visit, a busy site could blow through its cap in hours and then stop recording for the rest of the month. Sampling lets Adora keep recordings flowing for the full billing period while still honouring your plan’s limits.

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Why a fixed rate doesn’t work

A natural first instinct is to pick a single percentage — for example, “record 10% of sessions”. In theory, a site with 200,000 visitors a month and a 20,000 session cap would be perfectly covered at 10%. In practice, traffic is never flat. Mornings are busier than evenings. Weekdays are busier than weekends. A marketing campaign can 10× your usual load for a day. A fixed rate that looks right on average will almost always get it wrong in reality: 
Fixed 10% sample rate — sessions recorded over 30 days

Day 1–3:   ████████████████████ (cap hit)
Day 4–30:  (nothing)
The opposite is just as bad — set the rate too low, and you reach the end of the month with budget unused and recordings you’ve already paid for that were never taken.

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How Adora’s sampling works

Instead of a fixed percentage, Adora uses a self-adjusting sample rate that responds to your actual traffic. The idea is simple:
  • Adora keeps track of how many sessions are left in your monthly budget.
  • It watches how much traffic your site is currently receiving.
  • It nudges the sample rate up or down so the budget is likely to last the full billing period.
If traffic spikes, the rate drops a little to protect the remaining budget. If traffic goes quiet, the rate rises so you get more recordings out of that time. The rate is re-evaluated every minute, so it adapts as your traffic changes throughout the day and month. You don’t need to configure anything — it happens automatically, per organisation.

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What this means for you

  • You don’t set a sample rate. Adora manages it for you based on your plan cap and your traffic.
  • Coverage is spread across the full month. You won’t hit your cap in the first week and then see nothing for the rest of the billing period.
  • Individual sessions are selected at random within the current rate, so any single visit may or may not be recorded. Across many sessions, the recordings you see are representative of your overall traffic.

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Recording specific sessions every time

For a small number of sessions you always want captured — a VIP customer, a user reporting a bug, an internal tester — you can opt out of sampling per session using the bypassSampling flag when calling adoraStart: 
adoraStart({
  orgId: "ORGANIZATION_ID",
  bypassSampling: true, // or user.isVIP
});
Bypassed sessions are always recorded, but they still count toward your daily and monthly session caps. See Properties for the full reference.

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FAQ

Sessions are selected at random within the current sample rate. Any single visit may or may not be recorded — this is expected. If you need a specific session to always be recorded, use the bypassSampling option.
No. The sample rate is managed automatically so that your monthly cap is spread evenly across the billing period. If you need more recordings, upgrade your plan to a higher session cap.
No. Sampling only decides whether a new session is recorded at the moment it starts. Sessions already captured are unaffected by any change in the current rate.