Accessing traces in Cloud Trace

Cloud Trace is a distributed tracing system that collects latency data from the applications and displays it in near real-time. It allows you to follow a sample request through your distributed system, observe the network calls and profile your system end to end.

Note that Cloud Trace is disabled by default. To enable Cloud Trace, redeploy the customer-managed control plane using the YAML file in Enabling optional features.

The Anthos Service Mesh pages provide a link to the traces in the Cloud Trace page in the Google Cloud console.

Accessing traces

View trace samples for a service

To view a sampling of traces for a service in your app, follow these steps:

  1. Go to the Anthos Service Mesh page in the Google Cloud console.

    Go to the Anthos Service Mesh page

  2. Under Services, select the name of the Service you want to inspect.

    The following screenshot shows an example of a frontend Service.

    Anthos Service Mesh trace graph

  3. Under Request traces, click any trace to see more information.

    The following screenshot shows an example of the trace request subpanel.

    Anthos Service Mesh trace sub-panel

View all traces

To view all traces for a Service, follow these steps:

  1. Go to the Anthos Service Mesh page in the Google Cloud console.

    Go to the Anthos Service Mesh page

  2. Under Services, select the name of the Service you want to inspect.

  3. Go to the Metrics page.

  4. Specify a time span from the Time Span dropdown menu or set a custom span with the timeline.

  5. Click View traces.

The traces for a service in Anthos Service Mesh contain following information:

  • Request latencies across different services in the mesh.
  • HTTP request properties, including ID, URL, size, latency, and protocol.
  • Service name, namespace and mesh id as part of the labels istio.canonical_service, istio.namespace, and istio.mesh_id, respectively.

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