In a recent conversation on our SigNoz community Slack, a user shared their query that asks a deceptively simple question: what is the average time between two spans in a trace? The usefulness of this answer is evident if you think about how often the total trace time does not highlight the time you care about most. This could mean any number of things: that the total trace time of handling a web request might include lots of spans after a satisfying response was sent to the user.

At Grafana Labs, we are constantly improving our feature set, and tracing is no different. Traces are often overshadowed by logs and metrics, but they’re a pillar of observability for a reason. Used correctly, organizations that can quickly and successfully follow a chain of events through a system gain a more holistic view of their systems and are better equipped to find and fix issues faster.

In the context of application performance monitoring (APM) and observability, traces and spans are fundamental concepts that help users to track and understand the flow of requests and operations within a system. They are essential in assisting users to identify bottlenecks, troubleshoot issues, and optimize application performance.

In today’s rapidly evolving software landscape, ensuring observability is crucial for building robust and reliable applications. One of the critical components of observability is metrics, which provide valuable insights into the performance and behavior of our systems. OpenTelemetry, an open-source observability framework, offers a standardized approach to capturing, exporting, and analyzing metrics. This blog post explores seven OpenTelemetry metrics for tracking better visibility.

On-call shifts are part of every developer’s job – we’ve all been there. It’s 3am, suddenly you get an alert for an issue occurring in production. The microservices landscape is complicated and finding the root cause of an issue is like looking for a needle in a haystack. How can you get to the root of what’s happening in the system so you can analyze and resolve the issue quickly and effectively?

Get excited about Grafana Tempo 2.2! Not only is this release on time, but it is also chock full of TraceQL features and performance improvements. I was honestly a little shocked by how much we have accomplished in the last three months when summarizing the changelog.