Introduction

Tracing is a critical topic for distributed systems. You need to know how they are all performing, if any of your systems is suddenly becoming slow, if you need to scale up your servers, or if the load is low enough that you can scale down to reduce costs.

It’s not something exclusive to mobile apps, neither to backend systems. Having a better understanding of how the app performs in the hands of your users, how long does it take for the app to send and receive network requests, how long does it take to load a screen.

With tracing, you create spans that define a starting point and an ending point in time, and Grafana will provide the visual presentation for them.