GA release of Grafana Traces Drilldown
GA release of Grafana Traces Drilldown
We are excited to announce the General Availability (GA) release of Grafana Traces Drilldown, bringing a simplified, queryless experience to distributed tracing analysis. Building on months of public preview feedback and lessons learned from the Drilldown suite, this GA release delivers a refined, integrated solution for deep-dive trace analysis.
Key highlights
- Queryless exploration made simple: Traces Drilldown eliminates the need to write complex queries. Users can instantly access granular trace-level insights directly from their dashboards. This “queryless” design allows you to effortlessly connect the RED (Rate, Errors, Duration) golden signals with precise trace details.
- Seamless navigation: Enjoy a smooth transition between the high-level trace overview and deep dive span views. This unified navigation experience ensures that you maintain context as you shift from summary views to detailed analysis. This advanced drilldown capability improves incident analysis by providing the contextual insight needed for faster root cause identification.
- Built-in investigative tools: The Traces Drilldown interface features integrated filtering, highlighting, breakdowns, comparisons, and root cause correlation. These built-in tools enable rapid trace assessment by quickly spotlighting abnormalities without the need for external analysis tools.
- Detailed trace visualization: Once you’ve narrowed down your traces of interest, the trace view high-fidelity spans timeline reveals key metadata, duration, and status indicators, helping you quickly identify the origin of performance bottlenecks and errors.
- Unified observability experience: Traces Drilldown connects traces with logs, metrics, and profiles for a cohesive observability workflow. Effortlessly transition from an anomaly in logs or metrics into detailed trace views, enabling you to inspect spans and duration breakdowns to swiftly uncover underlying issues.
What’s new for GA
Exemplars
Now, when inspecting your traces, you can take advantage of integrated exemplars embedded directly within the trace metrics. Exemplars highlight representative spans that capture critical events or anomalies, providing a quick visual summary of key operations within your trace data. They help you correlate and prioritize areas that warrant further investigation, all without having to manually sift through extensive trace details.
Streaming
With support for TraceQL query streaming, Traces Drilldown now delivers partial results as they come in, so you no longer have to wait for all results to finish processing before starting your analysis. This capability enables you to review metrics and traces immediately, speeding up root cause analysis and helping you resolve issues more quickly. By receiving incremental results, you can begin exploring critical trace details as soon as they’re available, ensuring a more responsive and dynamic observability experience.
Bug fixes, fit and finish, and quality of life improvements
This release also brings a host of stability and usability refinements. We’ve addressed a range of bugs reported during the public preview phase and made targeted adjustments to the user interface, ensuring smoother navigation and a more polished overall experience. These quality of life enhancements, spanning from improved interactive elements to performance optimizations, empower you to conduct trace analysis with greater efficiency and confidence.
What this means for you
- Whether you’re tracing a request through your microservices or diagnosing performance anomalies, the Traces Drilldown experience streamlines investigations by simplifying your workflow. Start from one of the golden monitoring signals, pinpoint an issue, and drill down into traces through grouping and comparing, all without having to write custom queries.
- The enhanced, queryless interface accelerates your time-to-insight by reducing friction for operators and developers alike, enabling faster resolution of incidents and more effective optimization of distributed architectures.
- As part of the broader evolution of Grafana’s queryless UI, Traces Drilldown unifies your observability by working seamlessly with the improvements across logs, metrics, and profiles. This creates a truly integrated observability suite that meets users where they are.
With Traces Drilldown now GA, we continue our commitment to empowering modern observability teams, simplifying your investigative process and ensuring you have the right tools to maintain high performance across complex distributed systems.
