---
title: "Distributed tracing overview | Grafana Labs"
description: "Follow requests across services to find where they slow down or fail"
---

> For a curated documentation index, see [llms.txt](/llms.txt). For the complete documentation index, see [llms-full.txt](/llms-full.txt).

## What you get

| Feature                  | Description                                                 |
|--------------------------|-------------------------------------------------------------|
| **Grafana Cloud Traces** | Store and query distributed traces                          |
| **Tempo**                | High-scale trace backend                                    |
| **Trace Explorer**       | Search and visualize traces                                 |
| **Span details**         | See exactly what happened at each step                      |
| **App logs (Loki)**      | Structured application logs stored alongside traces         |
| **Trace-to-logs**        | Jump from any trace span directly to the relevant log lines |
| **Flexible sampling**    | Full-fidelity or tail sampling to balance coverage and cost |
| **Grafana Assistant**    | Investigate traces using natural language                   |

## Questions answered

| With distributed tracing, you can answer…               |
|---------------------------------------------------------|
| How did this request flow through all my microservices? |
| Where did this request spend the most time?             |
| Which service call failed and caused the error?         |
| What database query was slow for this specific request? |
| What did downstream services return?                    |
| What error message and stack trace caused this failure? |

## Problems solved

| Problem                                | Solution                                                             |
|----------------------------------------|----------------------------------------------------------------------|
| “It’s slow” but don’t know where       | Traces show time spent at each step.                                 |
| Errors happen but can’t find the cause | Span details show exact error message.                               |
| Sampling misses important traces       | Tail sampling keeps errors/slow requests; full-fidelity when needed. |
| Can’t connect trace to logs            | Trace-to-logs correlation jumps from span to log lines.              |
| Trace shows *where* but not *why*      | App logs in Loki provide the error detail and stack trace.           |

## Example: Tracing a slow request

[Traces panel showing a 1.2 second request with a waterfall view of 10 spans across Service 0, Service 1, Service 2, and Service 3, each operation taking 300ms](/media/docs/learning-hub/modules/intro-to-grafana-cloud/images/traces-example.png "Traces panel showing a 1.2 second request with a waterfall view of 10 spans across Service 0, Service 1, Service 2, and Service 3, each operation taking 300ms")