8 minute read
Reading a waterfall
Critical path, self time, and the difference between the slowest span and the reason you waited.
A trace is a shape, not a number
Everything in aggregate telemetry is a summary. A trace is the opposite: one request, in full, with the structure intact — which child called which, when each started, and how long each held its parent up.
That structure carries information no percentile can. Forty identical queries in a row and one query taking forty times as long produce the same total, and they are completely different bugs.
Section 1 of 5