Verify traces in Grafana Cloud

Send sample traces

You can use your instrumented application to send traces or can use the telemetrygen tool to send traces.

Use your instrumented application to send traces

Once Alloy is running, you can use your instrumented application to send traces. Start your application or service and then check Grafana Cloud to verify that traces are being received.

Use telemetrygen to send traces

You can use OpenTelemetry telemetrygen to generate tracing data.

1. Install telemetrygen using the installation procedure. NOTE: You don’t need to configure an OpenTelemetry Collector because we’re using Grafana Alloy.

2. Generate traces using telemetrygen:

   Bash Copy

   telemetrygen traces --otlp-insecure --rate 5 --duration 5s --otlp-endpoint 0.0.0.0:4317

   This configuration sends traces to Alloy for 5 seconds, at a rate of 5 traces per second.

If you receive a partialSuccess message, this indicates that the data has been received.

View traces in Grafana Cloud

To verify traces are being received using the TraceQL Query Editor, complete the following steps:

1. Sign in to your Grafana Cloud environment, for example mystack.grafana.net.

2. On the Grafana Cloud home page, open the navigation menu on the left side of the screen and click Explore.

3. From the data source drop-down at the top of the page, select your traces data source.

   For example, select grafanacloud-traces.

4. In the TraceQL query editor, select the Search tab and click Run query.

   The { } query searches for all traces without any filters, making it the simplest way to verify Grafana Cloud received the trace data.

5. Verify traces appear in the results. If your configuration works correctly, the query returns a list of all received traces.

In your final milestone, you reach the destination and explore next steps for expanding your observability capabilities.