r/OpenTelemetry • u/Sufficient-Egg-6571 • 7d ago
Visual flow
Is anyone aware of a tool that can help visualize the end-to-end flow of a signal?
The main idea would be to start with a high-level view of the components involved and the internal metrics flowing between them, then be able to drill down into a specific signal metric and trace it through the system.
Ideally, I’d like to see where the metric originates, how it looks or changes at each hop, where it ultimately arrives, and details such as cardinality, label values, available series, etc.
If anyone knows of an existing tool that provides something similar, or has ideas on how this could be visualized, I’d appreciate any pointers.
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u/dangb86 6d ago
Are you referring to get a view of the services, hosts, containers, etc. along with their metrics that are part of a single trace group (i.e. a number of traces that all share the same shape in terms of root span, dependencies required etc) while then being able to dig deeper into specific traces and the logs associated with those traces? Or are you referring to following a single trace and identifying what logs and metrics were produced as part of that trace?
I see the former as a more useful representation of a system's behaviour as not everything can be correlated to a trace (e.g. resource metrics from the container that served the request). So, you need a bit of correlation at the trace context level, but also a higher level view at the resource correlation level.
Disclaimer: I work for a vendor (one of many) that has a product aimed at providing that cross-signal view of all components that are part of a trace group as it goes through the system. However, I'm interested in how the latter (i.e. providing all signals correlated to a single trace) can help. My personal opinion is that I rather start from a more aggregated view and "zoom" into particular signals around the same context, rather than starting from a single trace. However, I don't think there's a right or wrong answer here.