Application Tracing Skill

Overview

Distributed traces in Dynatrace consist of spans - building blocks representing units of work. With Traces in Grail, every span is accessible via DQL with full-text searchability on all attributes. This skill covers trace fundamentals, common analysis patterns, and span-type specific queries.

Use Cases

1. Investigate Slow Requests

• Goal: Find and diagnose requests exceeding a latency threshold
• Trigger: "slow requests", "high latency", "p99 response time", "find traces over 5 seconds"
• Done: List of slow traces with duration, endpoint, service, and trace IDs for drilldown

2. Analyze Request Failures

• Goal: Identify failed requests, failure reasons, and exception patterns
• Trigger: "failed spans", "HTTP 500 errors", "exception analysis", "failure rate by service"
• Done: Failure breakdown by reason (HTTP code, exception, gRPC status) with exemplar traces