Read a trace on the public demo

Welcome to the Grafana Labs learning path that teaches you to read a distributed trace, hands-on, with live demo trace data.

Modern applications are often built from many small services that work together to answer a single request. A trace records the whole journey of one request as it moves through those services, and a span is one unit of work inside it: a single operation with a name, a duration, and a few key-value details called attributes. Spans nest, so a child span sits inside its parent, the span that triggered it. Reading a trace tells you what each step did and where the request spent its time. That skill is the same wherever you open a trace, so learning it once carries everywhere.

Here’s what to expect

When you complete this path, you’ll be able to:

• Open a real trace and take in its span waterfall, the stacked timeline that shows each span as a bar, at a glance
• Follow parent and child nesting to see which operation ran inside which
• Compare span durations to see where a request spent its time
• Read a service and operation name, and open a span for its attributes

Before you begin

No account or setup needed. This path uses live demo traces you can open right now.

This path teaches trace anatomy: how to read any trace you open, whether it landed in your lap or you went looking for it. It doesn’t teach how to investigate with Traces Drilldown or how to write a query; those come later.