---
title: "What you'll do | Grafana Labs"
description: "See what you'll do in this path and refresh the two words you'll use throughout: trace and span."
---

> For a curated documentation index, see [llms.txt](/llms.txt). For the complete documentation index, see [llms-full.txt](/llms-full.txt).

# What you'll do

You’re about to open a real trace and read it top-down, using live demo trace data you can open right away.

A quick reminder of the two words you’ll use the whole way through:

- A **trace** is one request’s whole journey through the services of a distributed system.
- A **span** is one unit of work inside that journey: a single operation, with a name, a duration, and a few key-value details called **attributes**. Spans nest: a child span sits inside the span that triggered it.

Here’s the plan:

1. Land on a set of good example traces and open one.
2. Read its span waterfall: the shape, the nesting, and the durations.
3. Open a span to read its details.

Read top-down and start at the root: the top row is the request itself, and everything below it is the work that request set off.