---
title: "Investigate a trace | Grafana Labs"
description: "Learn how to view the details of a trace so that you can determine which operations or services are causing delays"
---

# Investigate a trace

A trace typically consists of multiple spans, where each span represents a distinct unit of work, such as a specific operation within a service. Spans can also have child spans, representing nested operations or tasks.

In the following image, `shop-backend article-to-cart` is a trace that completes in 1.19 seconds. The trace contains a number of spans, for example, `authenticate`, `shop-backend place-articles`, and `shop-backend get article`. Each of those spans contain child spans.

Viewing the details of a trace allows you to gain insights into the performance and behavior of your system. For example:

- Traces help pinpoint specific operations or services causing delays, such as slow database queries or external API calls.
- You can visualize how different services and components interact, making it easier to identify problematic dependencies.
- You can divide the total latency of a trace into individual spans so that you can better understand where time is spent.
- Traces often include error information, helping you quickly identify and resolve issues.
- By understanding the flow of requests, you can optimize resource usage and improve overall system performance.

To view the details of a trace, click the trace name on the **Slow traces** tab.

The image below provides the following insights:

- The trace shows how the `shop-backend` service interacts with other services like `auth-service`, `cart-service`, and `article-service`. This helps identify which service contributes the most to the overall latency.
- The `get-article` operation within the `shop-backend` service takes the longest time (1.02s), with significant delays in the `select-articles` (579.69ms) and `postgres` (503.49ms) spans. This indicates potential database query inefficiencies.
- The trace highlights nested spans, such as `persist-cart` (353.04ms) within `cart-service`, showing how operations depend on each other.
- The `authenticate` operation takes 71.77ms, with 38.59ms spent in the `auth-service`. This suggests a moderate overhead for authentication.
- The visualization helps identify the critical path of the request, which is essential for optimizing the most impactful spans.

In the next milestone, you’ll investigate the details of a trace span to identify the root cause of latency.

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### More to explore (optional)

- [Traces structure](/docs/grafana-cloud/visualizations/simplified-exploration/traces/concepts/trace-structure/)