Observability

Traces

This feature is in Early Access

LaunchDarkly’s observability features are publicly available in early access.

They currently require the LaunchDarkly observability plugins and the JavaScript SDK. If you are interested participating in the Early Access Program for our upcoming observability plugins for server-side SDKs, sign up here.

Overview

This topic explains how to use LaunchDarkly’s observability features to trace session activity through your application. Traces let you filter on spans of traces in your product based on a query. The Traces view shows a summary of traces, including the number of traces and the latency associated with them over time.

A detailed view of a log entry.

A detailed view of a log entry.

Hover on any span and click Open to view more details about it, including the span duration, details about the initiating event, and information about the telemetry. Click View session or View logs to see the span’s related session or logs.

A detailed view of a log entry.

A detailed view of a log entry.

Get started

To instrument your application to capture traces, read the SDK documentation on Observability. The functionality is available through plugins to the LaunchDarkly JavaScript SDK.

To learn more about the search specification for the Traces view, read Search specification.

When you search on the Traces view, the following behaviors apply by default:

  • The default search key is span_name. For example, if you enter an expression without a key, such as search-term, then LaunchDarkly automatically expands that to span_name=*search-term*.

Search attributes

By default, the observability SDK plugin automatically injects the following attributes to provide additional help with searching for traces:

AttributeDescriptionExample
durationTime length of the span. Defaults to nanoseconds. Use s, m, or h suffixes to designate seconds, minutes, or hours.10s
environmentThe environment key, based on the SDK credentials used in the SDK plugin.production
has_errorsWhether the span has an error tied to its ID.true
parent_span_idSpan ID of the span’s parent.327611203ec5b0a1
secure_session_idSession ID that contains the span.wh1jcuN5F9G6Ra5CKeCjdIk6Rbyd
service_nameName of the service specified in the SDK plugin. To learn more, read Versioning sessions and errors.private-graph
service_versionVersion of the service specified in the observability SDK plugin. To learn more, read Versioning sessions and errors.e1845285cb360410aee05c61dd0cc57f85afe6da
span_kindBroad source of the span.Browser
span_nameTitle of the span.POST https://app.launchdarkly.com
trace_idTrace ID of the spans.7654ff38c4631d5a51b26f7e637eea3c