Traces

Uptrace collects distributed traces and organizes them into spans — individual units of work representing a single operation. The Traces section provides three views for navigating from aggregated operation metrics down to individual requests and their full execution path across services.

Groups

The default view groups traces by operation name. Each row represents a unique operation with aggregated metrics: request rate, p50/p90/p99 latency, error rate, and sparklines.

Traces are filterable by any indexed attribute. The Show Filters panel groups attributes by name and lists their values with span counts — for example _status_code with values error: 31, ok: 2.05k, or service_name with all active services and their counts. Values are selectable via checkboxes.

Available aggregations include perMin(count()) for request rate and p99(_dur_ms) for latency percentiles. Sparklines show how aggregated values change over time.

Traces

The Traces tab shows individual trace records with a volume histogram at the top. Each row represents a single trace with its root operation, services involved, timestamp, and duration.

Timeseries

The Timeseries tab displays a grid of charts — one per aggregation — showing how all operation groups behave over time. Each line represents a separate operation group.

Detail panel

Selecting an operation in the Trace view opens a detail panel with nine tabs.

ATTRS — key-value attributes of the selected span with type annotations (::str, ::int). Attributes are filterable by key name and grouped by category: host, os, otel, otel_library, product, service, telemetry, telemetry_sdk.

LOGS & ERRORS — logs and errors associated with this span group.

GROUP — aggregated metrics for all spans matching this operation: count, p50, p99, error rate. Includes Percentiles chart, Heatmap, Histogram, and Status chart. Links to Slowest spans and Spans with errors open the filtered view in Explorer.

JSON — raw span data exactly as collected.

TAGS — span tags.

INFRA, LOGS, NETWORK, TRACING — additional context tabs showing infrastructure metrics, related logs, network data, and tracing metadata associated with this operation.

Trace waterfall

The View Trace button opens the full trace view showing how a request flows across services.

At the top, a color-coded service breakdown bar shows the share of trace time per service (e.g. httpserver:frontend, httpclient:load-generator). The waterfall shows all spans as horizontal bars with their Operation name and Timeline.

Select services and Select systems dropdowns narrow the visible spans. The LOGS & ERRORS tab lists all logs and errors recorded within this trace.

Span detail in waterfall

Clicking a span in the waterfall opens a detail panel with the full context of that specific operation — attributes, aggregated stats, raw data, and related tracing metadata — making it possible to identify the exact point of failure and its cause.