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Google Cloud Trace collects distributed traces from your Google Cloud projects — the spans a single request leaves as it moves through your services. Investigations retrieve a trace to follow one request end to end and see where it slowed down or failed.
Cloud Trace is connected through Google Cloud. Connect Google Cloud once, then enable the projects you want investigations to read — there’s nothing to set up for Cloud Trace on its own.

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What we support

Investigations retrieve a trace by its ID, scoped to a project. A trace ID usually comes from elsewhere in the investigation — a log line, an error, or an earlier metric query points at a specific request, and the trace shows what happened to it. Once a trace is retrieved, investigations reconstruct it into the full picture of the request:
  • The span tree — every span linked to its parent, so you can see which call led to which, where time was spent, and which service handed off to the next.
  • The services involved — the set of services the request touched, drawn together from the trace so you can see its full path.
  • Where it failed — spans flagged as errors, whether from a failing HTTP status, an explicit error label, or a recorded exception, so the broken step stands out rather than being buried in the tree.
A trace can answer questions like:
Where did this request spend its time before it timed out?
Which downstream service returned the error the user saw?
How many services did this request pass through before it failed?

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Making sense of varied span data

Google Cloud services label their spans inconsistently — a Cloud Run service, a GKE container, an App Engine module, and an OpenTelemetry-instrumented service each name themselves differently, and errors show up under several different conventions. Investigations recognize these patterns, so a span gets attributed to the right service and an error is caught however it was recorded, instead of a trace reading as a wall of anonymous spans.

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Connecting Cloud Trace

Cloud Trace is connected through Google Cloud. Connect Google Cloud with a service account that can read traces, then enable the projects your team runs production workloads in. Each project is disabled by default, so you opt in deliberately; enabling one turns on its Cloud Trace access.

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Best practice

  • Enable the projects your responders actually investigate, rather than every project the service account can reach.
  • Grant the service account read-only trace access. Investigations only ever read from Cloud Trace.

Google Cloud

The provider Cloud Trace is connected through.

How telemetry works

How investigations query your traces.