Explore Traces

Distributed traces provide a way to monitor applications by tracking requests across services. Traces record the details of a request to help understand why an issue is or was happening. Tracing is best used for analyzing the performance of your system, identifying bottlenecks, monitoring latency, and providing a complete picture of how requests are processed.

Explore Traces helps you make sense of your tracing data so you can automatically visualize insights from your Tempo traces data. Using the app, you can:

• Use Rate, Errors, and Duration (RED) metrics derived from traces to investigate issues
• Uncover related issues and monitor changes over time
• Browse automatic visualizations of your data based on its characteristics
• Do all of this without writing TraceQL queries

[!IMPORTANT] Explore Traces is presently undergoing active development and is offered in a preview state. Subsequent updates are likely to incorporate significant changes that may impact existing functionality.

Before you begin

To use Explore Traces with Grafana Cloud, you need:

• A Grafana Cloud account
• A Grafana stack in Grafana Cloud with a configured Tempo data source receiving tracing data

To use Explore Traces with self-hosted Grafana open source or Grafana Enterprise, you need:

• Your own Grafana instance running 11.2 or newer
• Tempo 2.6 or newer
• A configured Tempo data source receiving tracing data

Getting started

Refer to the Explore Traces documentation. For instructions installing, refer to the access and installation instructions.

Resources

• Documentation
• CHANGELOG
• GITHUB

Contributing

We love accepting contributions! If your change is minor, please feel free submit a pull request. If your change is larger, or adds a feature, please file an issue beforehand so that we can discuss the change. You're welcome to file an implementation pull request immediately as well, although we generally lean towards discussing the change and then reviewing the implementation separately.

Bugs

If your issue is a bug, please open one here.

Changes

We do not have a formal proposal process for changes or feature requests. If you have a change you would like to see in Explore Traces, please file an issue with the necessary details.