Span
A span is a record of an individual operation within a trace, typically including its timing, context, outcome, and relationships to other operations.
Troubleshooting Java, Second Edition
A span is a recorded unit of work within a distributed trace, including its operation, timing, service, and associated metadata.
- How it is used
- Uses spans to reconstruct distributed request paths, compare service timing, and isolate failures across multi-hop workflows.
- How deep it goes
- Explains span relationships, fields, durations, and diagnostic patterns, but stops short of detailed tracing implementation internals.
- Examples
- Uses checkout traces, Kafka order processing, repeated payment attempts, and client-server timeout timelines.
- What you can do after
- Diagnose/debug with spans by tracing requests, interpreting timing, identifying retries, and comparing client-server behavior.
Read how Troubleshooting Java, Second Edition explains span →
Cloud Observability in Action
A span is a timed record of an individual operation or service segment within a distributed trace.
- How it is used
- Uses spans to visualize distributed request execution, investigate latency, troubleshoot failures, and correlate observability signals.
- How deep it goes
- Defines span structure, identifiers, propagation, sampling, visualization, and troubleshooting, while deferring backend-specific implementation details.
- Examples
- Uses checkout, billing, payment-provider, Go HTTP, happy-path, and injected-failure examples to demonstrate span timing and diagnosis.
- What you can do after
- Diagnose/debug with Jaeger by locating slow or failed services and comparing their spans with a healthy trace.
Quarkus in Action
A span is a recorded unit of work within a trace, such as a method invocation, database invocation, or remote request.
- How it is used
- Uses spans to follow individual operations within distributed requests and locate failures or slow processing.
- How deep it goes
- Defines span and trace IDs, nesting, and cross-service correlation, then shows how to inspect spans in Jaeger.
- Examples
- Shows a REST call with two database spans and a car-availability trace spanning three services.
- What you can do after
- Diagnose/debug with it by inspecting span relationships, timing, and request tags in Jaeger.
Secure APIs
A span is a recorded unit of work representing a step in the processing of a request or operation.
- How it is used
- Uses spans to observe API request processing, investigate errors, and expose security-relevant business-layer activity.
- How deep it goes
- Explains span structure, trace correlation, exception capture, and custom creation with attributes, without developing broader tracing internals.
- Examples
- Demonstrates GET /books request spans and a cart.create custom span containing user and cart attributes.
- What you can do after
- Diagnose/debug with it by correlating request events, inspecting attributes, and reconstructing exceptions through trace IDs.
gRPC Microservices in Go
A span is a timed record of one operation within a distributed trace, including its metadata and relationships to other operations.
- How it is used
- Uses spans to inspect individual operations along a request’s path across microservices.
- How deep it goes
- Defines spans as single-operation records and examines their metadata and timings, while demonstrating interceptor setup rather than manual span creation.
- Examples
- Examines create-order, Payment Create, and database spans with operation timings, gRPC metadata, and a SQL statement.
- What you can do after
- Diagnose/debug with it by comparing operation durations and inspecting span metadata in Jaeger.
Spring AI in Action
A span is a timed record of one operation or component segment within a distributed trace.
- How it is used
- Uses spans to trace AI request handling across application components, vector-store operations, RAG processing, and model calls.
- How deep it goes
- Examines nested operations and span tags for diagnosis, but does not detail span creation or trace internals.
- Examples
- Uses the POST /ask trace, Qdrant query and add spans, RAG processing, and GPT-4o-mini calls.
- What you can do after
- Diagnose request behavior with Jaeger by inspecting span hierarchies and tags.
Related concepts
- trajectorypart of · A trajectory is an ordered sequence of states, actions, events, or operations that records or describes progression through successive steps or over time.
- root spanincludes · A root span is the top-level span in a trace that represents the start or overall scope of an operation and may have child spans.
- OpenTelemetryproduced by · OpenTelemetry is an open, vendor-neutral observability standard and framework for instrumenting software and generating, collecting, and exporting telemetry such as traces, metrics, and logs.
- child spanincludes · A child span is a trace span representing a sub-operation nested beneath a parent span in a distributed trace.
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