---
title: "Analyze tracing data | Grafana documentation"
description: "Analyze tracing data using comparison, root cause analysis, and traces view to investigate trends and spikes."
---

# Analyze tracing data

To further analyze filtered spans, use tabs that change with the selected metric, such as **Breakdown**, **Comparison**, **Service structure**, **Root cause errors**, **Root cause latency**, **Exceptions**, and **Trace list**.

When you select a RED metric, the tabs change to match the context.

Each tab provides a brief explanation about the information provided.

## Use the Breakdown tab

The **Breakdown** tab splits the selected metric by the values of a chosen resource or span attribute. When you’re using **Duration** metrics, **Breakdown** shows the 90th percentile duration for every value of the selected attribute and orders values by average duration. When you select **Rate**, **Breakdown** orders the sequence of attributes by their rate of requests per second, with errors colored red.

You can change the **Scope** to show **Resource** or **Span**.

Using the **Attributes** sidebar, you can group the selected metric by different attributes. For example, if you have selected **Errors** as a metric type and then choose the `resource.service.name` attribute, the displayed results show the number of errors sorted by the `resource.service.name` with the most matches.

Use the **Attributes** sidebar to select the attribute for **Group by**. You can search, scope by **Resource** or **Span**, and use **Favorites** for quick access. Attributes already in your **Filters** are listed at the top of the **Attributes** sidebar.

By default, the selected attribute is your first **Favorite** or `resource.service.name`. You can reorder **Favorites** to change this default. The **Attributes** sidebar displays other commonly used resource level attributes such as `cluster`, `environment`, and `namespace`.

### Choose percentiles (Duration only)

When you select the **Duration** metric, use the **Percentiles** selector to choose which duration percentiles to plot and aggregate against. The default is 90th percentile (`p90`). You can select one or more of: `p50`, `p75`, `p90`, `p95`, `p99`. If you deselect all values, Traces Drilldown applies `p90` by default.

The percentile choice drives what Duration values are summarized and shown in the **Breakdown** tab. The selector appears only when **Duration** is selected.

## Use the Comparison tab

The **Comparison** tab helps you surface and rank which span attributes are most correlated with the selected metric so you can spot what’s driving your trace-level issues.

Upon selecting a metric, the tab computes, for each resource or span attribute, how strongly that attribute value differs between the selected subset (**selection**) and all other spans (**baseline**). It lists attribute‑value pairs in descending order of that difference, so the top entries are those most uniquely associated with your signal of interest.

- If you’re viewing the **Rate** or **Errors** metrics, the **selection** contains all spans with errors, while the **baseline** contains all spans without errors.
- If you’re viewing the **Duration** metric, by default the **selection** contains the slowest spans above the 90th percentile, while the **baseline** contains all other spans. You can manually adjust the selection on the duration heatmap.

The behavior of the comparison also differs depending upon the RED metric you’ve chosen. For example, if you’re viewing **Errors** metrics, the comparison shows the attribute values that correlate with errors. However, if you’re viewing **Duration** metrics, the comparison shows the attributes that correlate with high latency.

Use the **Attributes** sidebar to switch between **All** (overall differences) and a specific attribute (per‑value differences). Favorites, search, and scope controls work the same as in **Breakdown**.

### Focus on individual attributes with **Inspect**

**Inspect** lets you break down and view individual attribute values from a comparison. The overview shows each attribute with its single highest-difference value and an **Inspect** button, but you can’t see all values for that attribute at once.

When you select **Inspect**, the app focuses on that one attribute and shows a visualization for every value it contains. For example, selecting **Inspect** on `resource.service.name` shows every service with its baseline and selection bars, so you can immediately see which services are most correlated with the selected metric.

## Use the Structure tab

The **Structure** tab lets you extract and view aggregate data from your traces. The tab name differs depending on the metric you’re viewing:

- **Rate** provides **Service structure**
- **Errors** provides **Root cause errors**
- **Duration** provides **Root cause latency**

For **Rate**, the **Service structure** tab shows you how your applications talk to each other to fulfill requests. Use this tab to analyze the service structure of the traces that match the current filters.

For **Errors**, the **Root cause errors** tab shows the structure of errors beneath your selected filters. Use this tab to immediately see the chain of errors that are causing issues higher up in traces.

When you select **Duration** metrics, the **Root cause latency** tab shows the structure of the longest running spans so you can analyze the structure of slow spans.

The pictured spans are an aggregated view compiled using spans from multiple traces.

## Use the Exceptions tab (Errors metric only)

Use the **Exceptions** tab to see which exception messages are occurring within your current filters and time range. Exceptions are grouped by message so you can identify the most frequent failures and access the affected traces.

Examples:

- Inspect individual exceptions by clicking a message to open the **Trace list** pre-filtered for that message, so you can inspect individual traces immediately.
- Narrow exceptions by service, environment, namespace, or any span/resource attribute by combining with the **Filters** bar.

The Exceptions tab has a table with the following columns:

- **Exception Details**: Exception type, message text, emitting service, and last seen time grouped by unique exception
- **Occurrences**: Count of matching exceptions for the selected range
- **Frequency**: Sparkline of occurrences over time

Each row includes **Include** and **Exclude** buttons so you can filter the current investigation to focus on or eliminate a specific exception.

The **Exceptions** tab is available when the **Errors** metric is selected and exceptions are present. The tab respects the current time range and filters. For example, when Errors are selected, **Exceptions** works with both **Root spans** and **All spans** selections. The results reflect the data in scope.

If you notice a rise in the Errors metric, you can use the **Exceptions** tab to investigate the issue.

1. Select **Errors** as the metric.
2. Open the **Exceptions** tab.
3. The top row shows `Payment request failed. Too many requests (error code 429)` with rising occurrences and a spiky sparkline.
4. Click the message to jump to the Trace list pre-filtered by that exception.
5. Sort by Duration to find the most impacted requests, then open a trace to inspect retries and upstream dependencies.

## Use the Adaptive Traces tab

The **Adaptive Traces** tab appears when both of the following conditions are met:

- [Adaptive Traces](/docs/grafana-cloud/adaptive-telemetry/adaptive-traces/) is enabled and configured on your Grafana Cloud stack.
- You’ve applied an `instrumentation.tailsampling.policy` filter in the **Filters** bar.

When these conditions are met, the tab displays span latency data for the selected tail-sampling policy, helping you understand how the policy affects trace collection and latency distribution within the current time range.

If Adaptive Traces isn’t enabled or no tail-sampling policy filter is applied, the tab doesn’t appear.

## Use the Trace list tab

Each RED metric has a trace list:

- **Rate** provides a tab that lists **Traces**.
- **Errors** provides a list of traces with errors.
- **Duration** provides a list of **Slow traces**.

From this view, you can add additional attributes to new columns using **Add extra columns**.

Use the **Attributes** sidebar to add columns. Select multiple attributes to include them as table columns. Use **Search attributes** and **Favorites** to find attributes. Attributes already in your **Filters** are listed at the top of the **Attributes** sidebar.

## Change the selected time range

Use the time picker at the top right to modify the data shown in Traces Drilldown.

You can select a time range of up to 24 hours in duration. This time range can be any 24-hour period in your configured trace data retention period. The default is 30 days.

For more information about the time range picker, refer to [Use dashboards](/docs/grafana/next/dashboards/use-dashboards/#set-dashboard-time-range).

## Open a trace by ID

Use the header’s Trace ID input to open a specific trace:

1. Paste a trace ID into the Trace ID input in the header.
2. Press Enter to open the trace in the drawer.

When you open a trace from the results list, the Trace ID input clears to avoid stale values.

If a time range is selected, Traces Drilldown searches within the currently selected time range. Otherwise, it searches across all time. If a trace isn’t found, an error message appears—verify the ID and widen the time range if necessary.

This behavior depends on the Tempo data source configuration. Refer to [Tempo data source configuration](/docs/grafana-cloud/connect-externally-hosted/data-sources/tempo/configure-tempo-data-source/) for more information.