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Explore your traces using Trace Analyzer 🔗

Trace Analyzer lets you search traces generated by your application and identify patterns in the full-fidelity trace data without prior knowledge of which tags are relevant.

Trace Analyzer is available to all Splunk Observability Cloud Splunk APM users.

Examples of questions that Trace Analyzer helps you answer include:

  • How many traces and traces with errors exist for a given combination of service, environment, and tags?

  • For a given issue, which customers experience the highest error rate?

  • How to locate error spikes in my trace data?

To open Trace Analyzer, select Traces in Splunk APM and select Switch to Trace Analyzer. To switch back to the classic Traces view, select Switch to Classic View. See Explore your traces using Trace Search for more info about the classic Traces view.

When to use Trace Analyzer 🔗

Splunk Observability Cloud provides several tools for exploring application monitoring data. Trace Analyzer is suited to scenarios where high cardinality, high granularity searches and explorations are required for researching unknown or new issues. See Guidelines for working with low and high cardinality data.

The following table presents what each APM tool is best suited for:

Trace Analyzer

Tag Spotlight / Service map

Monitoring MetricSets

Identify patterns for unindexed tags

Surface trends for indexed tags

Get alerts on service degradation

Trace-level analysis

Service-level analysis

Workflow and service level analysis

High cardinality

Medium cardinality

Low cardinality

Trace Analyzer trace limits 🔗

Trace Analyzer can search a maximum of 6 hours of data.

Within the Trace Analyzer interface, there are three different display limits. The Trace Analyzer chart (1) and the Group Metrics (2) tab display up to 6 hours of traces. The list of traces displayed on the Traces tab (3) has a limit of 1,000 traces. For the Traces tab, Trace Analyzer searches for traces at the end of the time window you select. When 1,000 traces are matched or the six-hour search window is reached, the list stops populating.

Trace limit in trace list

Learn more 🔗

See the following links for more information on Trace Analyzer: