Tracing in Explore

You can use Explore to query and visualize traces from tracing data sources.

Query editor

You can query and search tracing data using a data source’s query editor.

Each data source can have it’s own query editor.

Trace View

This section explains the elements of the Trace View.

Header

Header title: Shows the name of the root span and trace ID.
Search: Highlights spans containing the searched text.
Metadata: Various metadata about the trace.

Minimap

Shows condensed view or the trace timeline. Drag your mouse over the minimap to zoom into smaller time range. Zooming will also update the main timeline, so it is easy to see shorter spans. Hovering over the minimap, when zoomed, will show Reset Selection button which resets the zoom.

Span Filters

Using span filters, you can filter your spans in the trace timeline viewer. The more filters you add, the more specific are the filtered spans.

You can add one or more of the following filters:

Service name
Span name
Duration
Tags (which include tags, process tags, and log fields)

Timeline

Shows list of spans within the trace. Each span row consists of these components:

Expand children button: Expands or collapses all the children spans of selected span.
Service name: Name of the service logged the span.
Operation name: Name of the operation that this span represents.
Span duration bar: Visual representation of the operation duration within the trace.

Clicking anywhere on the span row shows span details.

Span details

Operation name.
Span metadata.
Tags: Any tags associated with this span.
Process metadata: Metadata about the process that logged this span.
Logs: List of logs logged by this span and associated key values.

Trace to logs

You can navigate from a span in a trace view directly to logs relevant for that span.

Click the document icon to open a split view in Explore with the configured data source and query relevant logs for the span.

Trace to metrics

You can navigate from a span in a trace view directly to metrics relevant for that span.

Node Graph

You can optionally expand the node graph for the displayed trace. Depending on the data source, this can show spans of the trace as nodes in the graph, or as some additional context like service graph based on the current trace.

Service Graph

The Service Graph visualizes the span metrics (traces data for rates, error rates, and durations (RED)) and service graphs. Once the requirements are set up, this pre-configured view is immediately available.

Data API

This visualization needs a specific shape of the data to be returned from the data source in order to correctly display it.

Data source needs to return data frame and set frame.meta.preferredVisualisationType = 'trace'.

Data frame structure

Required fields:

Field name

Type

Description

traceID

string

Identifier for the entire trace. There should be only one trace in the data frame.

spanID

string

Identifier for the current span. SpanIDs should be unique per trace.

parentSpanID

string

SpanID of the parent span to create child parent relationship in the trace view. Can be undefined for root span without a parent.

serviceName

string

Name of the service this span is part of.

serviceTags

TraceKeyValuePair[]

List of tags relevant for the service.

startTime

number

Start time of the span in millisecond epoch time.

duration

number

Duration of the span in milliseconds.

Optional fields:

Field name

Type

Description

logs

TraceLog[]

List of logs associated with the current span.