---
title: "One trace view, several ways to open it | Grafana Labs"
description: "The trace display is the same wherever you open it; Explore and Traces Drilldown both reach it."
---

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

## One trace view, several ways to open it

By the end of the pipeline, your traces are stored and ready to open. But a stored trace only pays off once you can read it, and that’s the one skill the pipeline can’t hand you. Grafana can show a trace from more than one place, which is exactly what makes newcomers hesitate: pick one and you assume you’ve learned the wrong thing. You haven’t. They all open the same screen.

That screen is the **trace view**: the Grafana screen that shows a single trace. It lays the trace out as a timeline where each span is a row, stacked by when it started and nested under the span that triggered it, so you can see at a glance where the time went. That timeline is the **span waterfall**. Learn to read it once and the skill carries to every surface that shows a trace.

## Where you open a trace

- **Explore**: Grafana’s general-purpose screen for ad-hoc queries. It’s the traditional, universal way to open a trace.
- **Traces Drilldown**: a visual way to explore traces without writing a query, so you can open a trace without a query box.

Both open the same trace view. You can also ask **Grafana Assistant**, Grafana’s built-in AI helper, to pull one up for you, for example “show me a slow checkout trace from the last hour”.

Whichever one you pick, you land in the same place:

[Explore, Traces Drilldown, and Grafana Assistant all open the same trace view](trace-view-doors.svg "Explore, Traces Drilldown, and Grafana Assistant all open the same trace view")