Application Performance Monitoring (APM)

5. APM Trace Analyzer

We have arrived at the Trace Analyzer.

Trace Analyzer is a powerful tool in Splunk APM designed for exploring and analyzing distributed traces at scale. Because Splunk APM captures every trace with full-fidelity (NoSample), you have complete visibility into all transactions flowing through your services.

Trace Analyzer enables you to:

• Search with high-cardinality tags: Filter traces using any indexed span tag, such as customer IDs, order IDs, or custom business attributes.
• Visualize trace patterns: View trace and error counts over time to identify trends and anomalies.
• Analyze latency distribution: Use the heatmap view to understand trace duration patterns and spot outliers.
• Drill down to specific traces: Quickly find the exact trace you need, whether investigating a customer complaint or debugging a specific transaction.

This makes Trace Analyzer ideal for investigating unknown issues, researching specific transactions, and performing root cause analysis when you need to find a needle in a haystack.

Exercise

Find a failing checkout trace

• Find a trace with:
  • an error in the checkoutservice and the paymentservice (1)
  • and an Initiating Operation of frontend: POST /cart/checkout
  • then select the blue Trace ID (2) to continue
• This will open the Trace Waterfall for that specific trace.