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Documentation Grafana documentation Explore Simplified exploration Traces Drilldown Concepts Glossary

Glossary

The following terms are often used when discussing traces.

Active series

A time series that receives new data points or samples.

Cardinality

The total combination of key/value pairs, such as labels and label values for a given metric series or log stream, and how many unique combinations they generate.

Child span

A span that is nested within a parent span. Each child span represents a sub-operation or downstream call within the broader operation represented by its parent. A child span can itself be a parent of other child spans.

Data source

A basic storage for data such as a database, a flat file, or even live references or measurements from a device. A file, database, or service that provides data. For example, trace data is imported into Grafana by configuring and enabling a Tempo data source.

Event attribute

A key-value pair attached to a span event, which represents a unique point in time during the span’s duration. For more information, refer to Span events in the OpenTelemetry documentation.

Exemplar

Any data that serves as a detailed example of one of the observations aggregated into a metric. An exemplar contains the observed value together with an optional timestamp and arbitrary trace IDs, which are typically used to reference a trace.

Intrinsics

The core, built-in fields that are fundamental to the identity and lifecycle of spans and traces. Intrinsic fields include name, duration, status, and kind. These fields are defined by the OpenTelemetry specification and are always present.

Link attribute

A key-value pair attached to a span link. A span link associates one span with one or more causally related spans. For more information, refer to Span Links in the OpenTelemetry documentation.

Log

Chronological events, usually text-based, allowing for the diagnosis of problems. Logs can provide informational context, such as detailed records of all events during user interactions, for example, when events happen, who used the system, status messages, etc.

Metric

A number that helps an operator understand the state of a system, such as the number of active users, error count, average response time, and more.

Resource attribute

A key-value pair that represents information about the entity producing a span, such as the cluster name, namespace, Pod, or container name.

Root span

The first span in a trace, representing the initial request or operation. A root span has no parent span and serves as the top of the span tree.

Semantic attribute

A standardized naming scheme for attributes shared across languages, frameworks, and runtimes, as defined by the OpenTelemetry specification. For more information, refer to Trace Semantic Conventions in the OpenTelemetry documentation.

Span

A unit of work done within a trace.

Span attribute

A key-value pair that contains metadata to annotate a span with information about the operation it tracks. For example, a span tracking an “add to cart” operation might include the user ID, item ID, and cart ID as span attributes.

Spanset

The group of spans for each individual trace returned from a TraceQL query.

Trace

A trace represents the whole journey of a request or an action as it moves through all the nodes of a distributed system, especially containerized applications or microservices architectures. Traces are composed of spans. For more information, refer to What is Distributed Tracing?.