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Technical Details

Technical Details for Performance Tracing

Definitions

Trace: Describes the end-to-end journey of one or more connected spans.

Span: Describes an operation or "work" taking place on a service. Spans can describe broad operations - for example, the operation of an app fetching and rendering an image in the UI - or as granular as a single invocation of a function.

Root Span: A span that doesn't have a parent that represents the entire workflow at a high level.

Span Instance: A specific occurrence of a workflow, representing an individual run of it, identified by a unique Span ID.

Child Spans: Spans that list a given span as their parent. When filtering, a matching child span includes its parent.

Spans: Parent-Child Relationship

Span Outcomes

  • Successful (definition and if it’s auto or manual set)
  • Error (definition and if it’s auto or manual set)
  • User Abandon (definition and if it’s auto or manual set)
  • Unknown (definition and if it’s auto or manual set)

Span Filters

  • All Spans: Shows all Spans
  • Slowest Spans: Spans completed successfully with duration > p95.
  • Fastest Spans: Spans completed successfully and not slow (with duration < p95).

Types of Unsuccessful Spans:

  • Error: Spans encountered an error.
  • Unknown: Insufficient data to determine outcome.
  • User Abandon: User navigated away before completion.