---
title: "The value of Traces Drilldown | Grafana Labs"
description: "Understand the value of using Traces Drilldown in Grafana Cloud"
---

# 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.

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### More to explore (optional)

- [About Traces Drilldown](/docs/grafana/latest/explore/simplified-exploration/traces/)