---
title: "View exemplars | Grafana documentation"
description: "View exemplars to explore the links between metrics and spans."
---

# View exemplars

Exemplars connect your high-level metric trends to the individual traces that caused them, making it much faster to move from “something’s wrong” to “here’s exactly what happened.”

An exemplar is a specific trace representative of measurement taken in a given time interval. While metrics excel at giving you an aggregated view of your system, traces give you a fine-grained view of a single request; exemplars are a way to link the two.

Use exemplars to help isolate problems within your data distribution by pinpointing query traces exhibiting high latency within a time interval. After you localize the latency problem to a few exemplar traces, you can combine it with additional system based information or location properties to perform a root cause analysis faster, leading to quick resolutions to performance issues.

Think of exemplars as “bookmarks” in your metric data that point to actual traces. When you see a spike in error rates or latency in your metrics, exemplars let you click directly on a specific data point and jump to the actual trace that contributed to that metric.

For more information, refer to [Introduction to exemplars](/docs/grafana/next/fundamentals/exemplars/).

## Exemplars in Traces Drilldown

In Traces Drilldown, exemplar data is represented by a small diamond next to the bar graphs. You can view the exemplar information by hovering the cursor over the small diamond.

As you view metrics in the **Breakdown**, **Service structure**, or other investigation tabs, look for small diamond icons next to the bar chart metrics.

When you hover your cursor over a diamond, a tooltip appears showing:

- Exemplar details
- Trace information
- Timestamp and metadata

> Tip
> 
> Not seeing exemplars? Refer to [Exemplars in Grafana Cloud](/docs/grafana-cloud/send-data/traces/exemplars/#exemplars-in-grafana-cloud) for information about how to enable them.

Select **View trace** to open a slide-out trace panel that displays:

- The full trace that the exemplar represents
- All spans within that trace
- Timing and performance details
- Service relationships