This is documentation for the next version of Grafana. For the latest stable release, go to the latest version.
Concepts
Distributed traces provide a way to monitor applications by tracking requests across services. Traces record the details of a request to help understand why an issue is or was happening.
Tracing is best used for analyzing the performance of your system, identifying bottlenecks, monitoring latency, and providing a complete picture of how requests are processed.
To use the Grafana Traces Drilldown app, you should understand these concepts:
Rate, error, and duration metrics
The Traces Drilldown app lets you explore rate, error, and duration (RED) metrics generated from your traces by Tempo.
| Useful for investigating | Metric | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Unusual spikes in activity | Rate | Number of requests per second |
| Overall issues in your tracing ecosystem | Error | Number of those requests that are failing |
| Response times and latency issues | Duration | Amount of time those requests take, represented as a histogram |
For more information about the RED method, refer to The RED Method: how to instrument your services.
Traces and spans
A trace represents the journey of a request or an action as it moves through all the nodes of a distributed system, especially containerized applications or microservices architectures. This makes them the ideal observability signal for discovering bottlenecks and interconnection issues.
Traces are composed of one or more spans. A span is a unit of work within a trace that has a start time relative to the beginning of the trace, a duration, and an operation name for the unit of work. It usually has a reference to a parent span in a trace, unless it’s the first span, also known as the root span. It frequently includes key/value attributes that are relevant to the span itself, for example, the HTTP method used in the request, as well as other metadata such as the service name, sub-span events, or links to other spans.
For more information, refer to Use traces to find solutions in the Tempo documentation.
Was this page helpful?
Related resources from Grafana Labs
