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Stackdriver Trace for App Engine is GA; app latency has nowhere to hide

May 10, 2016
Sharat Shroff

Product Manager

At Google we're always obsessed with speed, in our products and on the web. Faster sites create happy users and improve engagement. Faster sites also reduce operating costs. Like us, Google Cloud Platform customers place a lot of value in speed — that's why we decided to externalize some of the tools that Google engineers use to optimize sites, including Stackdriver Trace.

A member of the Google Stackdriver family, Stackdriver Trace is now generally available for Google App Engine which receives over 100B requests per day. Stackdriver Trace automatically analyzes each of your applications running on GAE to identify performance bottlenecks and emergent issues.

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Impact of latency on application


Stackdriver Trace provides detailed insight into your application’s run time performance and latency in near real-time. The service continuously evaluates data from each traced request and checks for patterns that indicate performance bottlenecks. To remove the operational overhead for performance analysis, Stackdriver Trace automatically analyzes your application’s performance over time. You can also create reports to evaluate your application’s latency across versions or releases. With the Latency shift detection feature, the service evaluates each of the reports to evaluate if there has been a significant shift in latency over time.

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The Stackdriver Trace API can be used to add custom spans to a trace. A span represents a unit of work within a trace, such as an RPC request or a section of code. For custom workloads, you can define your custom start and end of a span using the Stackdriver Trace SDK. This data is uploaded to Stackdriver Trace, where you can leverage all the Trace Insights and Analytics features mentioned above.

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Trace is already integrated with other Stackdriver tools such as monitoring, logs, error reporting and debugger.

Today Trace works seamlessly across your distributed environment, and supports all language runtimes on the App Engine platform. Stay tuned for Trace coverage for other GCP platforms.

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Get started today

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We’re looking forward to this next step for Google Cloud Platform as we continue to help developers and businesses everywhere benefit from Google’s technical and operational expertise in application performance. Please visit Stackdriver Trace to learn more and contact us with your feedback and ideas.

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