Journey overview on Grafana Labs

Follow a slow request across services, not just within one

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 18:58:09 -0400

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

The benefit of traces

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 18:58:09 -0400

Where did the time go across services?

A checkout request comes in slow. It doesn’t run in one place: it hops from the web service, to the cart service, to the payments service, to the inventory service, each running separately and passing the request along. Software built this way, from separate services running on different machines that cooperate to handle one request, is a distributed system. Each independently running part is a service, and the route the request takes from service to service is its request path.

Why metrics and logs can’t answer it

You already have metrics and logs, but neither follows the request across the hops. Metrics tell you something is wrong, checkout is slow, without saying where. Logs show what happened inside a single service, then stop at that service’s edge. So the request crosses four services and neither signal points to which hop lost the time.

Each signal covers a different slice of the request path, and neither slice pinpoints the slow hop.

The missing view

You need something that follows the single request along its whole path and records how long each hop took. That’s the view the rest of this journey builds toward.

Before you begin

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 18:58:09 -0400

Before you begin

You’re comfortable with metrics and logs. This journey adds traces as a third signal.
No prior tracing experience is assumed.
No Grafana Cloud account or running pipeline is required. The one hands-on exercise uses a public demo, so nothing needs to be set up.