---
title: "Follow a slow request across services, not just within one | Grafana Labs"
description: "What you'll learn in the introduction to tracing journey, who it's for, and how long it takes."
---

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

## What you’ll learn

When a request slows down as it crosses several services, your metrics and logs each show one piece of the picture. A trace shows the whole path, so you can see which service lost the time. This journey teaches you to read one.

Here’s what this journey covers:

- **What a trace is**: How one request’s journey across services is captured as a trace
- **When to reach for a trace**: When to reach for a trace instead of metrics or logs
- **The four-stage path**: The stages that turn a request into a trace you can open
- **Reading a trace**: Open a real trace and find where the request spent its time, without setting anything up

You won’t set tracing up for your own system here. Producing traces, carrying and storing them, and connecting them to your other signals are covered in the separate setup journey.

## Journey duration

~40 minutes