Trace Maps

This topic is about Container Observability’s support for distributed tracing (DT). Knowledge of distributed tracing is assumed for the reader of this section.

Traces are created for each transaction that is executed in an application starting with the initial request from the external client. These traces are emitted by the application components as spans that represent each interaction between components.

Trace Spans are stored in systems like Jaeger and Grafana Tempo as two prominent examples.

Traces are very voluminous and are hard to use due to this. Typically, Traces are used by app teams to debug a problem. Going back and looking at a particular trace is done during the debug process. Ops teams do not receive the real-time information required for their needs and tend not to use traces in their work.

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