APM Trace Heatmap view

The Kloudfuse Trace Heatmap is a trace-data visualization tool that helps you to visually detect and identify deviations and outliers in latencies reported by APM data.

The Trace Heatmap plot is a grid of time-axis (horizontal) and duration-axis (vertical). Each cell of the Trace Heatmap captures the count of detected events (number of spans) within the time bucket and duration bucket. The visualization also uses deeper colors for higher span counts, and lighter colors for lower span counts to easily indicate of the distribution of span latencies over a selected time period.

One of the many powerful features we developed for troubleshooting application performance issues is the K-Lens.

Follow these steps to get to the Traces: Heatmap interface:

  1. Click the APM tab, and then the Trace Heatmap option in the drop-down menu.

    navigate to apm trace heatmap

  2. The Trace Heatmap interface appears.

Using the APM Heatmap Interface

The Traces: Heatmap interface has the following information and affordances:

Traces Pie chart view

  1. Filters help you to determine what requires your immediate attention. For details, see APM Traces Filters.

    APM Filters

    To show filters, expand the filters: click the show filters (Show filters) icon in the top left corner of the page.

    To hide the filters, click the hide filters (Hide filters) icon in the top right corner of the filter panel.

  2. Search for any tag on ingested spans.

  3. Overall interval. The default is Last 5 minutes. Click the drop-down to use the time picker and select the appropriate time interval.

    Time picker

  4. Refresh display: click Refresh (Refresh) to update the display.

  5. The Heatmap has a static specification for the Query Builder, the show heatmap duration, Show heatmap duration (ns).

  6. Select the Errors only option to report only on traces that contain an error.

    errors only

  7. From the Spans drop-down, select if you plan to examine all spans, service entry spans only, or trace root spans only.

    Spans selector

  8. Click Add Query to add a new query. See Add Query.

  9. Click Run (Run) to construct the heatmap.

  10. The View type selector enables you to specify the view by selecting one of the following modes:

    heatmap

    Heatmap view

    This article discusses this view.

  11. Click Export (Export) icon to add the chart as a panel of a new or existing dashboard.

  12. Heatmap of the selected metric that matches the filters and time interval criteria.

    The plot is a grid of time-axis (horizontal) and duration-axis (vertical). Each cell represents the number detected events (number of spans) within the time bucket and duration bucket as a shade of the same color: deeper colors for higher span counts, and lighter colors for lower span counts.

The Trace Heatmap enables users to select a region on the Heatmap, with options to view spans and events, or start advanced analysis using K-Lens.