OpenTelemetry Trace Analyzer
Paste OTEL JSON trace data to visualize a waterfall timeline, find the critical path, identify slow spans, and get a per-service breakdown. A sample trace is pre-loaded.
Trace Input
Expected: { "traceId": "...", "spans": [{ "spanId", "parentSpanId", "name", "service", "startMs", "durationMs", "status" }] }
Waterfall Timeline
Slowest Spans
| Name | Service | Duration |
|---|
Service Breakdown
Frequently Asked Questions
What is OpenTelemetry (OTEL)?▼
OpenTelemetry is a vendor-neutral observability framework providing APIs, SDKs, and tools to instrument and export traces, metrics, and logs. It is a CNCF project and the de-facto standard for distributed tracing across microservices.
What is a trace and a span?▼
A trace represents the end-to-end journey of a single request through your distributed system. It is composed of spans — each span is a unit of work (HTTP call, DB query, function). Spans have a name, start time, duration, status, and optionally a parent span ID forming a tree.
What is the critical path?▼
The critical path is the longest sequential chain of spans that determines the minimum possible trace duration. Optimizing critical-path spans directly reduces overall latency.
What does the waterfall chart show?▼
The waterfall chart shows each span as a horizontal bar at its start-time offset and sized by duration. It makes it easy to spot parallel vs sequential spans and which spans dominate total latency.
How do I interpret span status codes?▼
OTEL defines: UNSET (default), OK (explicit success), and ERROR (error occurred). For HTTP spans: 2xx maps to OK, 5xx maps to ERROR. An ERROR status should include a description attribute.
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