The value of Traces Drilldown

Distributed traces provide a way to monitor applications by tracking requests across services. Traces record the details of a request to help understand why an issue is or was happening.

Grafana Traces Drilldown helps you visualize insights from your Tempo traces data. Using the app, you can:

• Use Rate, Errors, and Duration (RED) metrics derived from traces to investigate issues
• Uncover related issues and monitor changes over time
• Browse automatic visualizations of your data based on its characteristics
• Do all of this without writing TraceQL queries

Tracing is best used for analyzing the performance of your system, identifying bottlenecks, monitoring latency, and providing a complete picture of requests processing.

• Decrease mean time to repair and mean time to identify an issue by pinpointing exactly where errors or latency are occurring within a transaction across multiple services.
• Optimize bottlenecks and long-running code by visualizing the path and duration of requests. Tracing can help identify bottleneck operations and long-running pieces of code that could benefit from optimization.
• Detect issues with generated metrics. Tracing generates metrics related to request rate, error rate, and duration of requests. You can set alerts against these high-level signals to detect problems.
• Seamless telemetry correlation. Use tracing in conjunction with logs and metrics for a comprehensive view of events over time, during an active incident, or for root-cause analysis. Tracing shows relationships between services and dependencies.
• Monitor compliance with policies. Business policy adherence ensures that services are correctly isolated using generated metrics and generated service graphs.