APM Traces

The Trace List shows raw trace and span data, where you can apply filters, restrict results by service, names of end points, span type, and many other attributes.

View the traces associated with your service to drill down to problematic spans. You can filter on core facets such as status, resource, and error type. By default, Kloudfuse filters the traces based on service, environment, and operation name.

For more detailed trace information, you can click the span name and view its flame graph.

Follow these steps to get to the Traces interface:

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

    navigate to apm traces

  2. The Traces interface appears.

Using the APM Traces interface

The Traces interface has the following information and affordances:

APM services
APM Traces

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

  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. Total Requests counter reports the number of requests that your system traces.

  9. Compare option enables you to compare the the time series to an earlier time interval.

    Depending on the time series data, you can compare the metric to 1 hour before, 1 day before, 1 week before, 1 month, and 1 year before.

    traces compare

    In this example, we compare the traces with 1 day before:

    compare traces day before

  10. Click Explore metric (Explore Metric) icon to expand the chart to full size.

    See View full size chart.

  11. Click the gear (gear) icon, and select Show Log Scale option.

    show log scale

  12. A chart of all traces that meet the filtering and time interval criteria.

    Hover your pointer over the chart to note the values of the metric and specific times.

  13. The Options menu controls the measurements that appear in the Traces list.

    Options for the span list

  14. Click Add to Dashboard to add the results to a dashboard; see Add to Dashboard.

  15. Click Download to save the selected traces to your computer in one either CSV or JSON format. See Download Traces.

  16. List for all Traces. You can control the columns of this list through the Options drop-down.

  17. Hover your pointer over the name of the trace; Kloudfuse displays some of the attribute. Here, the attributes are availability zone, cloud account id, kf platform, kube cluster name, and kube namespace.

  18. To see the full detail of the trace, click on any column in the list.

    Kloudfuse displays the entire detail of the trace. See Trace Details.

    • Info, including span name, trace id, duration, latency, method, all attributes, and so on metrics, and logs.

    • Metrics, with graphs for the trace that correspond to the Hits, Errors, Latency, and Execution Time Breakdown.

    • Logs, that lists all log entries for the trace ID.

  19. Hover the pointer over the Trace latency Breakdown linear chart in one of the spans.

    Kloudfuse displays all spans covered by the trace, their duration, and the relative percentage allocated to that span.

View full size chart

To see the full metric chart, click Explore metric (Explore Metric) icon to expand the chart to full size.

The chart provides the following information and affordances:

Hits full size chart

  1. The chart of the metric for the specified time interval appears in the main area.

  2. The metric and its statistics (Avg, Min, Max, Sum, and Value) appear under the horizontal axis.

  3. Click the selector for the chart type, and choose one of the options from the drop-down:

    Choose chart type

    • Line has the normal, thick, and thin option.

    • Bar has the "stacked" option.

    • Area has the stacked option.

    • Points, which has no additional display options.

  4. 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

  5. Compare to Previous if you chose the Line chart type.

    Depending on the time series data, you can compare the metric to the previous Hour, Day, Week, Month, and Quarter.

    Compare metrics to other time periods

  6. Choose the Y Scale setting: click either the linear (Linear) or Log(Log) option.

Add to Dashboard

To add the current results to a dashboard, follow these steps:

  1. In the interface, click the Add to dashboard (Add to Dashboard) button.

  2. The Add panel to dashboard dialog appears.

  3. In the dialog, specify if you want to add to a New Dashboard (default), or an Existing Dashboard:

    ][[new]

    1. Select the folder from the drop-down.

    2. Enter the name of the new dashboard.

    3. Enter the panel name for the new chart.

Download Traces

Kloudfuse downloads all trace data, not just the portions you choose to display:

  • Date

  • Service

  • Span Name

  • Duration

  • Method

  • Status Code

  • Endpoint

  • Trace Span Count

  • Trace Latency Breakdown

  • Span Type

  • Span ID

  • Parent Span ID

  • Trace ID

  • Root Span

To download the selected traces to your computer, follow these steps:

Download menu for traces

  1. In the Traces interface, click download (Download).

  2. A dialog window appears, with the following options:

    • Download as CSV

    • Download as JSON

  3. Select one of the options by clicking on it.

  4. The download starts.

  5. Unless you are downloading a very small volume of data, you will see the Downloading traces progress dialog.

    Progress window for downloading traces

  6. [Optional] Click Interrupt download if you want to stop a very large download.

    Kloudfuse gives you the option to save partial results (all the traces saved to your system buffer at the time you interrupted the download), or to cancel the saving process.

Next steps

Explore the other APM Trace views: