Epsagon automatically captures every call in your stack and makes sure to connect distributed traces as they span between services. In the dashboard, you can visualize your trace to better understand the flow or performance of every call in your application.

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What is a distributed tracing?

Distributed tracing, also called distributed request tracing, is a method used to profile and monitor applications, especially those built using a microservices architecture. Distributed tracing helps pinpoint where failures occur and what causes poor performance.

Epsagon shows traces in the traces window:

Graph view

The main part of the trace window is the graph view. It allows you to quickly understand the flow of the trace. Every node in the graph represents a resource in your application, and it contains a name and a type.
Nodes can be clicked to get more information about them in the resource details section. Note that every resource can contain multiple operations, and all of them will be listed in the resource details section.
Selected node marked in purple. Nodes marked with red represent the
The graph view can be zoomed in or out using the scrollbar and can be panned by clicking and dragging the canvas or the node.
Edges represent connections between resources, and the displayed number on them represents the total duration of the operations made on the destination node.

Timeline view

While the graph help to quickly understand the flow, a timeline can help you quickly detect performance issues or bottlenecks. Switching to the timeline view can be done from the tabs section named "Views". The timeline is represented with a waterfall chart:

Every row represents an operation in the trace. The row includes the type, name, and operation on the left side, and a horizontal bar represents the overall duration of that event.
Every row can be clicked to expand with the operation details for that specific call.

Resource details

The resource details section shows the metadata and the payload of every call:

Every call is presented in a collapsed row. To reveal the details you can click on the desired call. The details you will be able to see are:

1. Labels - tags that manually labeled by you using the tracing library.
2. Tags - Metadata information that the tracing library collected automatically.
3. Additional tags - Payload information that the tracing library collected automatically.

Navigating the window

The traces window will store every trace that you opened in your session, and you can navigate between them in the "Traces list" section.
You can completely close the window by clicking the "X" on the upper left part, or to minimize the window into the bottom left part by clicking the "_".

To share the current trace that you're exploring - just click on the link icon on the upper left part of the window.

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Show/hide the trace window

Press ESC to minimize the window
Press SHIFT+ESC to maximize the window