Introducing the new Google Cloud Trace Explorer

Distributed tracing is a critical part of an observability stack, and Cloud Trace is Google Cloud's native tracing product. The new Trace explorer page has been improved with a filter bar, faceted span filter pane, and visualization of matching spans. The filter bar allows users to choose a Google Cloud project-based trace scope, all/root spans, and a custom attribute filter. The faceted span filter pane displays commonly used filters based on OpenTelemetry conventions. The visualization includes an interactive span duration heatmap, span rate line chart, and span duration percentile chart. A table of matching spans can be narrowed down further by selecting a cell of interest on the heatmap. The new features can be used to troubleshoot applications, such as investigating latency and errors in a retail webstore application. The new Trace explorer is powered by BigQuery and will have new features launched, including SQL queries, flexible sampling, export, and regional storage. The new Cloud Trace explorer is generally available to all users and allows developers and SREs to effectively troubleshoot production incidents. The new features enable service-oriented investigations with advanced querying and visualization of trace data.