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Overview

What is Sematext Tracing?

Sematext Tracing is a modern, OpenTelemetry-based distributed tracing solution that helps you monitor and troubleshoot complex microservices architectures and distributed systems. Built on the industry-standard OpenTelemetry protocol, it provides deep insights into your application's performance, latency patterns, and error propagation across services.

Key Features

OpenTelemetry Native

  • Industry Standard: Built on OpenTelemetry (OTel), the vendor-neutral standard for observability
  • OTLP Support: Native support for OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP) via HTTP and gRPC
  • Auto-Instrumentation: Automatic instrumentation for popular frameworks and libraries
  • Language Support: SDKs for Java, Python, Node.js, Go, .NET, Ruby, PHP, and more

Trace Analysis

  • End-to-End Visibility: Track requests across multiple services and infrastructure components
  • Service Maps (coming soon): Visualize service dependencies and communication patterns
  • Latency Analysis: Identify performance bottlenecks with P50, P95, and P99 percentiles
  • Error Tracking: Pinpoint errors and exceptions with detailed stack traces

Powerful Search and Filtering

  • Traces Explorer: Search and filter traces by service, operation, duration, and custom attributes
  • Timeline View: Visualize trace distribution over time
  • Advanced Filters: Filter by response status, span errors, database operations, and more

Intelligent Alerting

  • Threshold-Based Alerts: Set alerts on latency, error rates, and trace volume
  • Anomaly Detection: Automatic detection of unusual patterns
  • Alert Integrations: Connect with PagerDuty, Slack, email, and other notification channels

How It Works

  1. Instrument Your Application: Add OpenTelemetry SDK to your application (auto or manual instrumentation)
  2. Configure Sematext Agent: Deploy Sematext Agent with OTLP receiver enabled
  3. Send Traces: Your application sends traces to the local Sematext Agent
  4. View and Analyze: Access traces through the Sematext Cloud UI
graph LR
    A[Application<br/>with OTel SDK] -->|OTLP| B[Sematext Agent<br/>OTLP Receiver]
    B -->|Secure Export| C[Sematext Cloud]
    C --> D[Trace Analysis<br/>& Visualization]

Benefits

Faster Problem Resolution

  • Quickly identify the root cause of performance issues
  • Understand error propagation across services
  • Reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR)

Optimize Performance

  • Identify slow database queries and API calls
  • Find inefficient service communication patterns
  • Optimize critical user journeys

Scale with Confidence

  • Monitor distributed systems at any scale
  • Understand system behavior under load
  • Plan capacity based on real usage patterns

Developer-Friendly

  • Easy integration with existing code
  • No vendor lock-in with OpenTelemetry
  • Rich SDKs for all major languages

Use Cases

  • Microservices Monitoring: Track requests across complex microservices architectures
  • API Performance: Monitor API latency and error rates
  • Database Performance: Identify slow queries and connection issues
  • User Journey Analysis: Understand end-to-end user experience
  • Troubleshooting: Quickly diagnose production issues

Getting Started

Ready to start tracing your applications?

  1. Create a Tracing App in Sematext Cloud
  2. Choose your SDK and instrument your application
  3. Install Sematext Agent with OpenTelemetry support
  4. Explore your traces and gain insights

Need Help?