Master debugging with four ways to visualize your traces

In a landscape dominated by microservices and distributed systems, effectively visualizing request traces is crucial for understanding system performance and troubleshooting issues. The text discusses four visualization techniques: the Gantt graph, Flame graph, Span Node Graph, and the newly introduced Service Node Graph, each offering unique insights. The Gantt graph provides a time-based view for identifying latency and understanding request sequences. The Flame graph highlights span hierarchies, helping locate performance bottlenecks in nested operations. The Span Node Graph offers a granular perspective on the interaction between individual spans, revealing detailed component relationships. Lastly, the Service Node Graph aggregates spans by their corresponding services, offering a clearer representation of microservices interactions and simplifying the complexity of large traces. Together, these tools allow developers to address performance issues, debug errors, and optimize request flows from various angles.