Traces

This topic explains how to use the observability Traces page to view OpenTelemetry trace data stored in LaunchDarkly. An OpenTelemetry trace is a record of activity for a request that your application processes. Traces show how a given request flows through different services or components. Each trace consists of multiple spans, where each span represents a single operation or step taken to process a request. Spans include attributes such as a span name, duration, and related context. The Traces page helps you filter available trace spans by querying the span attributes you choose. It provides a main chart to help you aggregate and visualize the individual spans returned by your query. Select tabs at the bottom of the Traces page to display raw data for the results of your query:

• Overview shows the grouped aggregation values associated with the chart display.
• Spans shows one row for each span in your query result.
• Traces shows one row for each trace that contains spans from your query result.

In the Spans or Traces tab, hover over an entry in the first column to view options for displaying details about the selected row. Select Open to view full trace details associated with the span or trace, or select the Vega icon to add the span or trace to a Vega prompt. You can also open a service’s details panel from either tab. In the Spans tab, click a service name in the “Service Name” column. In the Traces tab, click a service name in the “Root service” column. To learn more, read Service details.

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Get started

To instrument your application to capture traces, read the documentation on Observability SDKs. The functionality is available through plugins to the LaunchDarkly JavaScript SDK. To ingest OpenTelemetry traces from other source, read Observability integrations and configure your application to use the LaunchDarkly observability endpoints. To view available traces, open the Telemetry section and navigate to the Traces list.

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Search

To learn more about the search specification for the Traces view, read Search specification. When you search on the Traces view, the following behaviors apply by default:

• The default search key is span_name. For example, if you enter an expression without a key, such as search-term, then LaunchDarkly automatically expands that to span_name=*search-term*.

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Search attributes

By default, the observability SDK plugin automatically injects the following attributes to provide additional help with searching for traces:

Category	Attribute	Description	Example
Feature flag	feature_flag	Produces a list of spans that are associated with a feature flag. You can refine results with the following additional attributes: context.id, contextKeys, key, provider.name, result.reason.inExperiment, result.reason.kind, result.value, set.id, and .variant.	true
Service or application	environment	The environment key, based on the SDK credentials used in the Observability SDKs.	production
	secure_session_id	Session ID that contains the span.	wh1jcuN5F9G6Ra5CKeCjdIk6Rbyd
	service_name	Name of the service specified in the SDK plugin. To learn more, read Versioning sessions and errors.	private-graph
	service_version	Version of the service specified in the observability SDK plugin. To learn more, read Versioning sessions and errors.	e1845285cb360410aee05c61dd0cc57f85afe6da
Trace properties	duration	Time length of the span. Defaults to nanoseconds. Use s, m, or h suffixes to designate seconds, minutes, or hours.	10s
	has_errors	Whether the span has an error tied to its ID.	true
	parent_span_id	Span ID of the span’s parent.	327611203ec5b0a1
	span_kind	Broad source of the span.	Browser
	span_name	Title of the span.	POST https://app.launchdarkly.com
	trace_id	Trace ID of the spans.	7654ff38c4631d5a51b26f7e637eea3c