Documentation Grafana Cloud Visualize data Simplified exploration Explore Traces Investigate trends and spikes

Investigate trends and spikes

Explore Traces provides powerful tools that help you identify and analyze problems in your applications and services.

Using these steps, you can use the tracing data to investigate issues.

1. Select the primary signal.
2. Choose the metric you want to use: rates, errors, or duration.
3. Define filters to refine the view of your data.
4. Use the structural or trace list to drill down into the issue.

Give it a try using Grafana Play

With Grafana Play, you can explore and see how it works, learning from practical examples to accelerate your development. This feature can be seen on the Grafana Play site.

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Change the primary signal type to observe

Tracing data is highly structured and annotated and reflects events that happen in your services. You can choose the type of services you want to observe and think about.

You can use the full trace (trace roots), or you can select a more specific type, such as service or database calls.

By default, Explore Traces displays information about full traces. You can change this by using the selector in the filter bar.

You can use any one of these primary signal types.

Full traces

Inspect full journeys of requests across services

Server spans

Explore service-specific segments of traces

Consumer spans

Analyze how queues are consumed. A consumer span indicates an asynchronous handoff between services. These handoffs are almost always a queue.

Database calls

Evaluate performance issues in database interactions

All spans

View and analyze raw span data

Choose a RED metric

Explore Traces uses RED metrics generated from your tracing data to guide your investigation. In this context, RED metrics mean:

• Rates show the rate of incoming spans per second.
• Errors show spans that are failing.
• Duration displays the amount of time those spans take; represented as a heat map that shows response time and latency.

When you select a RED metric, the tabs underneath the metrics selection changes match the context. For example, selecting Duration displays Root cause latency and Slow traces tabs. Choosing Errors changes the tabs to Root cause errors and Errored traces. Rate provides Service structure, and Traces tabs. These tabs are used when you analyze tracing data.

To choose a RED metric:

1. Select a graph to select a Rate, Errors, or Duration metric type. Notice that your selection changes the first drop-down list on the filter bar.
2. Optional: Select the signal you want to observe. Full traces are the default selection.
3. Look for spikes or trends in the data to help identify issues.

Define filters

Next, refine your investigation by adding filters.

Filters are available on the Breakdown and Comparison tabs.

Each time you add a filter, the condition appears in the list of filters at the top of the page. The list of filters expands as you investigate and explore your tracing data using Explore Traces.

1. Refine your investigation by adding filters.
2. Optional: Choose one of the attributes to group by or use Search to locate the service.
3. Optional: Use the tabs underneath the metrics selection to provide insights into breakdowns, comparisons, latency, and other explorations.
4. Choose filters to hone in on the problem areas. Each filter that you select adds to the Filter statement at the top of the page. You can select filters on the Comparison and Breakdown tabs in the following ways:
   • Select Add to filters.
   • Select Inspect.
   • Use the Filter bar near the top.

Use the Breakdown tab

The Breakdown tab highlights attributes that are correlated with the selected metric. When you’re using Duration metrics, Breakdown orders the sequence of attributes by their average duration. When you select Rate, Breakdown orders the sequence of attributes by their rate of requests per second, with errors colored red.

You can change the Scope to show Resource or Span.

Using the Group by selector, you can group the selected metric by different attributes. For example, if you have selected Errors as a metric type and then choose the service.name attribute, the displayed results show the number of errors sorted by the service.name with the most matches.

The app defaults to service.name and displays other commonly used resource level attributes such as cluster, environment, and namespace. In the drop-down list, you can choose any resource level attribute to group by.

Modify a filter

Selecting an option for a filter automatically updates the displayed data. If there are no matches, the app displays a “No data for selected query” message.

To modify an applied filter:

1. Select the filter to modify in the filter bar.
2. Select an option from the drop-down list.

You can also click in the Filter bar to add filters using drop-down lists.

Remove filters

You can remove all or individual filters.

To remove a filter, select Remove filter (X) at the end of the filter you want to remove.

To remove all filters, select Clear filters (X) from the right side of the filter bar.

Selecting Clear filters resets your investigation back to the first metric you selected. For example, if you selected Errors metrics and Group by the host service.name, selecting Clear filters resets the search back to just Errors selected as the metric type.

Analyze tracing data

To further analyze the filtered spans, use the dynamically changing tabs, Comparison, Structure and Trace list.

When you select a RED metric, the tabs underneath the metrics selection changes match the context.

Each tab provides a brief explanation about the information provided.

Comparison

The Comparison tab highlights attributes that are correlated with the selected metric.

The behavior of the comparison also differs depending upon the RED metric you’ve chosen. For example, if you’re viewing Error metrics, the comparison shows the attribute values that correlate with errors. However, if you’re viewing Duration metrics, the comparison shows the attributes that correlate with high latency.

Structure

The structural tab lets you extract and view aggregate data from your traces.

• Rate provides Service structure
• Errors provides Root cause errors
• Duration metrics provides Root cause latency

For Rate, the Service structure tab shows you how your applications “talk” to each other to fulfill requests. Use this tab to analyze the service structure of the traces that match the current filters.

For Errors, the Root cause errors tab shows structure of errors beneath your selected filters. Use this tab to immediately see the chain of errors that are causing issues higher up in traces.

When you select Duration metrics, the Root cause latency tab shows the structure of the longest running spans so you can analyze the structure of slow spans.

The pictured spans are an aggregated view compiled using spans from multiple traces.

Trace list

Each RED metric has a trace list:

• Rate provides a tab that lists Traces.
• Errors provides a list of Errored traces.
• Duration lists Slow traces.

Change selected time range

Use the time picker at the top right to modify the data shown in Explore Traces.

You can select a time range of up to 24 hours in duration. This time range can be any 24-hour period in your configured trace data retention period. The default is 30 days.

For more information about the time range picker, refer to Use dashboards.