Visualize Traces

Overview

Click on a trace of interest in your Explore Screen to view its underlying spans. Select your preferred visualization mode — Dependencies, Gantt, or Flame view — to explore varied views of the span data.

For each, the trace header presents details of the number of services represented, the span depth, total spans, the number of events that occurred, and the date and total length of the span.

Dependencies view

Toggle between Service and Span views to view the communication between services or the span trajectory underlying an operation in your application.

Service view

Visualize the relationship between services, understand the order of activities in a trace, and gain a clear picture of the application's architecture. On a high level, Service view will showcase how related operations across multiple microservices connect in a single trace and will display the entire route of any message sent through Kafka, RabbitMQ, SQS, and other message brokers.

To explore each step more fully, click on the relevant node to reveal all of a service’s spans (internal, incoming, and outgoing) in the right-hand Service Overview panel. Click on a specific span to view information about its service requests and responses, errors, span attributes, events, and correlated logs for the service operation.

Select the type of information to be displayed on the span edges in the drop-down menu on the bottom left of the screen (e.g., max span duration or number of calls per service).

Note that non-instrumented services are displayed with perforated lines and lack metadata.

Spans view

View a mapping of the span trajectory for your trace.

Hover over a span action to view the service name, along with its operation name, application, duration, and subsystem.

Click on a span link to view all of the occurrences and their respective durations.

Select a tag from the GROUP BY menu in the bottom left-hand corner of the screen. When you select tags to group by, you must also select the aggregation type (min, max, avg, sum).

GANTT view

Visualize spans as horizontal bars along a timeline. The timeline illustrates the relationship between components and shows the sequence in which each activity occurred, along with its duration. This visual representation helps you quickly spot bottlenecks and delays that may be causing performance issues in your application.

Flame view

View your trace’s spans as horizontally stacked rectangles, visually representing their duration and relationships within a trace.

Distributed Tracing

Next Kubernetes Dashboard