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Documentation Grafana Tempo Metrics-generator Service graphs Metrics queries

Service graph metrics queries

A collection of useful PromQL queries for service graphs.

In most cases, users want to see a visual representation of their service graph. Grafana uses the service graph metrics created by Tempo and builds that visual for the user. However, in some cases, users may want to interact with the metrics that define that service graph directly. They may want to, for example, programmatically analyze how their services are interconnected and build downstream applications that use this information.

To help with this, we’ve provided a collection of useful PromQL queries that can be used to explore service graph metrics.

Instant Queries

An instant query will give a single value at the end of the selected time range. Instant queries are quicker to execute and it often easier to understand their results. We will prefer them in some scenarios:

Connectivity between services

Show me the total calls in the last 7 days for every client/server pair:

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sum(increase(traces_service_graph_request_server_seconds_count{}[7d])) by (server, client) > 0

If you’d like to only see when a single service is the server:

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sum(increase(traces_service_graph_request_server_seconds_count{server="foo"}[7d])) by (client) > 0

If you’d like to only see when a single service is the client:

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sum(increase(traces_service_graph_request_server_seconds_count{client="foo"}[7d])) by (server) > 0

In all of the above queries, you can adjust the interval to change the amount of time this is calculated for. So if you wanted the same analysis done over one day:

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sum(increase(traces_service_graph_request_server_seconds_count{}[1d])) by (server, client) > 0

Range queries

Range queries are nice for calculating service graph info over a time range instead of a single point in time.

Rates over time between services

Taking two of the queries above, we can request the rate over time that any given service acted as the client or server:

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sum(rate(traces_service_graph_request_server_seconds_count{server="foo"}[5m])) by (client) > 0

sum(rate(traces_service_graph_request_server_seconds_count{client="foo"}[5m])) by (server) > 0

Notice that our interval dropped to 5m. This is so we only calculate the rate over the past 5 minutes which creates a more responsive graph.

Latency percentiles over time between services

These queries will give us latency quantiles for the above rate. If we were interested in how the latency changed over time between any two services we could use these. In the following query the .9 means we’re calculating the 90th percentile. Adjust this value if you want to calculate a different percentile for latency (e.g. p50, p95, p99, etc).

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histogram_quantile(.9, sum(rate(traces_service_graph_request_server_seconds_bucket{client="foo"}[5m])) by (server, le))

Using the optional metric for latency of a messaging system to see potential middleware latencies:

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histogram_quantile(.9, sum(rate(traces_service_graph_request_messaging_system_seconds_bucket{}[5m])) by (client, server, le))