Traces

The Traces panel shows distributed trace spans from your applications. Navigate to Insights > Traces.

Two Views

The panel has two view modes, toggled with buttons in the toolbar:

• List — Tabular view of all spans (default)
• Waterfall — Visual timeline of a single trace's span hierarchy

List View

The list shows spans in a table with these columns:

Column	Description
received_at	When the span was received
trace_id	The trace this span belongs to (clickable)
span_id	Unique span identifier
name	Operation name
duration	How long the span took
status	OK, ERROR, or UNSET
kind	INTERNAL, SERVER, CLIENT, PRODUCER, or CONSUMER
service_name	The originating service

Click a trace ID in the table to switch to the waterfall view for that trace.

Filters

• Time range — Last hour, 24 hours, 7 days, or 30 days
• Status — Filter by OK, ERROR, or UNSET
• Kind — Filter by span kind (Internal, Server, Client, Producer, Consumer)
• Service — Filter by service name
• Search — Full-text search across span names and attributes

Waterfall Visualization

When you click a trace ID (or navigate with ?trace_id=abc123), the panel switches to waterfall mode showing all spans for that trace.

The waterfall displays:

• Left column — Span names indented by depth in the parent-child hierarchy, with duration labels
• Right column — Horizontal bars positioned on a time axis showing when each span started and how long it ran
• Time axis — Header with tick marks showing relative time from the trace start

Bars are color-coded by service name. Error spans are shown in red.

Span Detail

Click any span in the waterfall to expand its detail section. This shows:

• Trace ID, Span ID, Parent Span ID
• Status code and status message
• HTTP details (method, URL, status code)
• Database details (system, statement)
• Attributes, Events, and Links as JSON

A View Logs button navigates to the Logs panel filtered to this trace's ID.

Navigation

• Click Back to list to return to the table view
• The URL updates to include ?trace_id=abc123 so waterfall views are bookmarkable
• Navigate directly to /insights/traces?trace_id=abc123 to open a specific trace

Log Correlation

Traces and logs are linked bidirectionally:

• Traces → Logs: Click "View Logs" on a span to see logs for that trace
• Logs → Traces: Click a trace ID in the Logs panel to jump to the waterfall

TIP

To send traces from your applications, use the Air API's trace ingestion endpoint. See Sending Telemetry Data.

Next Steps

• Explore Logs correlated with your traces
• Query traces with SQL for advanced analysis
• View the Audit Trail for security events