Important: This documentation is about an older version. It's relevant only to the release noted, many of the features and functions have been updated or replaced. Please view the current version.

Explore

Tracing in Explore

Enterprise Open source

Tracing in Explore

Explore allows you to visualize traces from tracing data sources. This is available in Grafana v7.0+.

Supported data sources are:

For information on how to configure queries for the data sources listed above, refer to the documentation for specific data source.

Header title: Shows the name of the root span and trace ID.
Search: Highlights spans containing the searched text.
Metadata: Various metadata about the trace.

Minimap

Shows condensed view or the trace timeline. Drag your mouse over the minimap to zoom into smaller time range. Zooming will also update the main timeline, so it is easy to see shorter spans. Hovering over the minimap, when zoomed, will show Reset Selection button which resets the zoom.

Timeline

Shows list of spans within the trace. Each span row consists of these components:

Expand children button: Expands or collapses all the children spans of selected span.
Service name: Name of the service logged the span.
Operation name: Name of the operation that this span represents.
Span duration bar: Visual representation of the operation duration within the trace.

Clicking anywhere on the span row shows span details.

Span details

Operation name
Span metadata
Tags: Any tags associated with this span.
Process metadata: Metadata about the process that logged this span.
Logs: List of logs logged by this span and associated key values. In case of Zipkin logs section shows Zipkin annotations.

Trace to logs

Note: Available in Grafana 7.4 and later versions.

You can navigate from a span in a trace view directly to logs relevant for that span. This is available for Tempo, Jaeger and Zipkin data source at this moment. their relevant documentation for instruction how to configure this feature.