New: Audit Trail – see who made changes to your alerts, dashboards, Apps in your account, who gave access to whom, etc.  Learn more

Sematext Tracing:
Distributed Tracing & APM Built on OpenTelemetry

Get end-to-end visibility across your entire stack with OpenTelemetry-native distributed tracing. Start tracing in minutes with zero code changes—at a fraction of the cost.
14-day free trial. No credit card required.

Go Live With Tracing in Under 10 Minutes

Sematext Tracing delivers enterprise-grade distributed tracing and APM capabilities without the operational overhead of self-hosting solutions like Jaeger, Grafana, or Elastic Stack.
No servers to manage, no storage to scale, no upgrades to plan.

Get deep visibility into your applications at 50-80% less cost than Datadog or New Relic.
Track every request, identify bottlenecks, and optimize performance with intelligent sampling, detailed trace analysis, and quick navigation to related logs and metrics.

Send traces directly via OTLP (OpenTelemetry Protocol) using HTTP or gRPC. Deploy Sematext Agent to automatically collect and forward traces from your applications. Works with OpenTelemetry Collectors, Jaeger, Zipkin, and any OTLP-compatible instrumentation. No proprietary agents or formats required.

Find traces instantly with powerful search and filtering by service, operation, latency, errors, or custom attributes. Use Traces Explorer to analyze individual traces and trace patterns, examine detailed waterfall views in Single Trace View, and dive into span-level details to identify anomalies and performance issues across your services.

Automatically detect and track errors across all your services. See error rates, error types, and stack traces in context with the full request trace. Understand the impact of errors on user experience and quickly identify the root cause of failures in distributed systems.

Navigate from traces to related logs and metrics with quick action menus. When viewing traces, click on pods, nodes, or hosts to instantly access related metrics and logs for complete context. Enhanced correlation features are coming soon to provide even deeper integration across all telemetry data for effective troubleshooting in one unified platform.

Works with Your Stack

Sematext Tracing integrates seamlessly with your existing tools and frameworks. Support for all major languages (Java, Python, Node.js, Go, .NET, Ruby), browser applications (JavaScript/TypeScript), mobile platforms (iOS/Swift, Android), and popular frameworks (Spring, Django, Express, Rails, React, Vue, Svelte). Deploy anywhere - Kubernetes, Docker, containers, or bare metal. 

Collect telemetry from your custom applications as well as infrastructure components like web servers (Nginx, Apache), databases, message queues, and any OpenTelemetry-compatible service.
See all SDKs and Frameworks

OpenTelemetry Native from Day One

Built on the industry-standard OpenTelemetry framework, Sematext Tracing works with your existing instrumentation. Whether you're using auto-instrumentation or custom spans, our platform ingests, processes, and visualizes OpenTelemetry data without proprietary lock-in. Future-proof your observability stack with open standards.

Start tracing in minutes with OpenTelemetry auto-instrumentation for Java, Python, Node.js, .NET, and more. No code changes required – just add the agent and start seeing traces. Automatically captures HTTP requests, database queries, message queues, and more. Perfect for getting started quickly or instrumenting legacy applications.

Follow requests across multiple services, languages, and protocols with W3C Trace Context propagation. See the complete journey of a request from frontend to backend, through microservices, databases, and caches. Correlate traces with logs and metrics using trace IDs for complete observability.

Add custom spans to track business-critical operations, feature flags, or specific code paths. Enrich traces with custom attributes like user IDs, order values, or feature flags. Use OpenTelemetry SDKs to instrument exactly what matters to your business, giving you insights beyond technical metrics.

Pre-made charts & dashboards

Get out-of-the-box visualizations specific to each service you integrate. This means you can start monitoring what matters most right away, with default alerts notifying you of critical issues for each service type.
Explore dashboards

Trace Every Request, Optimize Every Service

Understand how requests flow through your distributed systems. Track latency, identify bottlenecks, and optimize performance with OpenTelemetry-powered distributed tracing that shows you exactly where time is spent across services, databases, and third-party APIs.

Dynamic service maps are coming soon to visualize your application architecture, dependencies, and communication patterns. Currently, you can explore service relationships through distributed traces and understand request flows across your microservices. Service topology insights are derived from trace data to help identify bottlenecks.

See exactly where time is spent in every request with detailed latency breakdowns. Waterfall views show the timeline of spans, making it easy to identify slow database queries, external API calls, or inefficient service communication. Track P50, P95, and P99 latencies to understand real user experience.

Collaborate effectively

Our platform fosters a culture of collaborative resolution, empowering your team to diagnose and fix issues faster, smarter, and together. Share access, insights, and context instantly to speed up root cause analysis and decision-making.

Enable seamless collaboration across DevOps, SREs, and engineering teams. Invite team members to explore issues together, speeding up investigations and reducing downtime. Turn any account into a Team account free of charge and assign appropriate roles to each team member.

Keep stakeholders informed without requiring them to learn Sematext or granting them full access to your applications or infrastructure . Email real-time snapshots and reports with one click. Ideal for audits, updates, or incident reports. Schedule email reports to be sent at any desired frequency.

Protect data privacy and access with fine-grained RBAC (Role-Based Access Control). Whether you’re running a small team or managing multiple departments, this ensures that the right people have the right access in our centralized log management platform. The built-in Audit Trail provides insights about who did what, where and when, from which IP address and country.

Query Billions of Spans in Under a Second

From startups to enterprises, Sematext Tracing handles billions of spans daily with consistent sub-second query performance. Scale confidently without worrying about infrastructure or data limits.

Set alerts on latency thresholds, error rates, or any custom span attribute. Get notified before users notice issues. Alert on P95 latencies, service dependencies, or business metrics extracted from traces. Integrate with your existing incident management workflow.

Automatically generate Rate, Error, and Duration (RED) metrics from your traces. Monitor service health at a glance with request rates, error percentages, and latency percentiles in the Tracing Overview. No additional instrumentation needed – metrics are derived directly from your trace data.

Identify slow database queries, N+1 problems, and connection pool issues. See actual SQL statements, query execution times, and database operations in context with application traces. Optimize database performance with data-driven insights from production traffic.

Smart Sampling for Cost-Effective Tracing

Control costs without losing visibility with intelligent sampling strategies that capture what matters most while keeping your tracing bills predictable.

Configure intelligent head-based sampling to capture the right traces. Always sample errors and high-latency requests while sampling normal traffic at lower rates. Set service-specific sampling rates based on criticality. Keep costs predictable while maintaining visibility into issues.

Pay only for what you use with transparent per-span pricing. No hidden fees, no complicated calculations. Set limits to control costs, and get recommendations for optimizing your trace volume. Typically 50-80% cheaper than DataDog or New Relic with no compromise on features.