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The Traces page lists the requests and jobs your services traced. Open one to see its spans as a waterfall, inspect a span’s attributes, and jump to the log lines of the same request.
Trace Waterfall

One trace opened: the span waterfall and the selected span's attributes

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Traces and Spans views

  • Traces lists one row per trace: timestamp, root span, services, span count, duration, and errors. A trace with a single span is not listed here. Make at least one nested call so a parent and a child appear together.
  • Spans lists individual spans, with service, kind, and status.
All services narrows both views to one service. The search bar uses the same syntax as Logs, over the span fields. Plain text searches the span name. A query with an operator is a filter.
  • duration_ms compares the span duration in milliseconds.
  • status = 'error', 'ok', or 'unset' matches the span status.
  • A dotted name on the left of an operator is a span attribute: db.system != 'redis'.

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Filters

The Filters panel shows facets for Service, Operation, Status, and Kind with counts. Click a value to add it to the query.

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Reading a trace

  • The waterfall shows every span with its start offset and duration. Nested spans sit under their parent.
  • Filter spans by service, name, or kind narrows the tree. Expand all and Collapse all fold it.
  • Color switches the coloring between Service and Kind.
  • Click a span to see its service, kind, status, self time, and every attribute, such as http.route, http.response.status_code, and db.statement where the instrumentation sets them.
  • View logs opens the Logs page filtered to the trace’s trace_id.

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Before data arrives

An empty Traces page shows the setup steps: the OTLP traces endpoint, the bearer token, instrumenting the service, and sending a multi-span trace. Traces appear within seconds of the exporter’s batch.

Exemplars

From a spike on a chart to one of these traces.

Custom spans

Give a queue job or a database call a span of its own.