Docs » Analyze services with span tags and MetricSets in Splunk APM » Analyze service performance with Tag Spotlight

Analyze service performance with Tag Spotlight 🔗

Use Tag Spotlight to analyze the performance of your services in Splunk Observability Cloud to discover trends that contribute to high latency or error rates with indexed span tags. You can break down every service by each indexed span tag to view its metrics. When you select span tag values or a time range, you can view relevant traces to learn more about outlying incidents.

For every service, Tag Spotlight provides request, error, and duration (RED) metrics time-series charts for every value of each indexed span tag within the specified time range in the APM navigation menu. Request and error charts display the total number of requests, errors, and root cause errors, and duration charts display p50, p90, and p99 latency. These values are based on Troubleshooting MetricSets (TMS), which Splunk APM generates for every indexed span tag.

The following image shows the requests and errors of an example frontend service broken down by the values of indexed span tags. The graph is powered by Troubleshooting MetricSets.

This image shows the requests and errors of an example frontend service broken down by indexed span tag.

To learn how to index span tags to generate Troubleshooting MetricSets, see Index span tags to generate Troubleshooting MetricSets. For a general overview of MetricSets in APM, see Learn about MetricSets in APM.

Note

For an example use case of troubleshooting using Tag Spotlight, see Find the root cause of an error using Tag Spotlight. For an interactive walkthrough of Tag Spotlight, see APM Tag Spotlight Scenario.

View service performance by indexed span tags with Tag Spotlight 🔗

Access Tag Spotlight from the Tag Spotlight tab of the APM landing page to analyze the performance of every indexed span tag value for a service. You can break down performance for each tag by either requests and errors or latency.

Follow these steps to navigate to Tag Spotlight for a specific service:

  1. From the Splunk Observability Cloud landing page, click APM.

  2. In the list of services on the APM landing page, select a service you want to drill into. Clicking on the service opens the Troubleshooting tab for that service.

  3. Scroll to the Tag Spotlight card in the sidebar to view a preview of top tags with errors and high latency. Click the card to open Tag Spotlight.

  4. View the distribution of all indexed span tags. The RED metrics time-series chart displays requests, errors, root cause errors, or latency for the specified time range.

  5. Adjust the time range to view more or less data in the RED metrics chart. The default time range is for the last 15 minutes, and the data resolution is 10 seconds.

Use the Service picker in the top bar of Tag Spotlight to view metrics for a different service.

Use case: Find the root cause of an incident with Tag Spotlight 🔗

To view a detailed use case example of using Tag Spotlight, see Find the root cause of an error using Tag Spotlight.