Observability Glossary

Trace

You can think of a trace as the trail of clues an author leaves in a mystery novel (or distributed system). Each clue (or span) provides a piece of the puzzle, enabling the detective (you) to reconstruct the sequence of events and understand what led to a particular outcome.

For example, in a web application, a trace might capture the journey of a user request as it passes through the frontend, backend, and database layers, highlighting any bottlenecks or errors along the way.

To implement tracing, you can use OpenTelemetry to instrument your code and collect tracing data. By correlating trace data with logs, you can get a deeper understanding of the behaviour of your application, even in the most uncommon situations. This will enable you to detect, diagnose and resolve issues faste.

Explore related concepts

Span

A span is the primary building block of a distributed trace. It is a specific unit of work within a distributed system, typically representing a single operation.

Observability

Observability is the ability to understand how your application is working and behaving in production through telemetry data (logs, metrics, traces, wide events, etc.). It enables you detect, diagnose and resolve issues in your app before they impact your users and become problems.

Distributed Tracing

Distributed Tracing is a method for tracking the flow of requests through your application. It enables you to follow the journey of a request as it travels across multiple services, so you can see where things might be going wrong.