Tracing in Explore
This documentation topic is designed for Grafana workspaces that support Grafana version 9.x.
For Grafana workspaces that support Grafana version 10.x, see Working in Grafana version 10.
For Grafana workspaces that support Grafana version 8.x, see Working in Grafana version 8.
Explore allows you to visualize traces from tracing data sources.
The following data sources are supported.
For information on how to configure queries for the data sources listed above, refer to the documentation for specific data source.
Trace View explanation
This section explains the elements of the Trace View dashboard.
Header
The header of the trace view has the following elements
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Header title: Shows the name of the root span and trace ID.
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Search: Highlights spans containing the searched text.
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Metadata: Various metadata about the trace.
Minimap
Shows condensed view or the trace timeline. Drag your pointer over the minimap to zoom into smaller time range. Zooming will also update the main timeline, so it is easy to see shorter spans. Hovering over the minimap, when zoomed, will show Reset Selection button which resets the zoom.
Timeline
Shows list of spans within the trace. Each span row consists of these components:
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Expand children button: Expands or collapses all the children spans of selected span.
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Service name: Name of the service logged the span.
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Operation name: Name of the operation that this span represents.
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Span duration bar: Visual representation of the operation duration within the trace.
Span details
Clicking anywhere on the span row shows span details, including the following.
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Operation name
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Span metadata
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Tags: Any tags associated with this span.
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Process metadata: Metadata about the process that logged this span.
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Logs: List of logs logged by this span and associated key values. In case of Zipkin logs section shows Zipkin annotations.
Node graph
You can optionally expand the node graph for the displayed trace. Depending on the data source, this can show spans of the trace as nodes in the graph, or add some additional context, including the service graph based on the current trace.
Trace to logs
You can navigate from a span in a trace view directly to logs relevant for that span. This is available for Tempo, Jaeger, and Zipkin data sources. Refer to their relevant documentation for instructions on how to configure each data source.
Click the document icon to open a split view in Explore with the configured data source and query relevant logs for the span.
Service Graph view
The Service Graph view visualizes the span metrics (traces data for rates, error rates, and durations (RED)) and service graphs. Once the requirements are set up, this pre-configured view is immediately available.
For more information, see Tempo data
source page. You can also see the service graph view page
