Trace

Definition

A trace is a group of spans — in most cases a chronological sequence of cause and effect — that together represent the full lifecycle of a single request through a distributed system. Traces are identified by a globally unique trace ID that is propagated between services as a correlation identifier.

In depth

Distributed traces (traces that span multiple services or systems) are visualised as waterfall graphs showing each span's start time, duration, and relationship to other spans. Trace context propagation follows the W3C Trace Context specification, which defines the `traceparent` HTTP header as the standard carrier for trace IDs across service boundaries. Traces are invaluable for debugging latency issues, understanding service dependencies, and performing capacity planning. obseria.io stores traces in its unified telemetry store alongside logs and metrics, enabling one-click correlation: click any error trace to see the surrounding log lines and the infrastructure metrics from the same time window.

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