Datadog's Distributed Tracing allows users to search and analyze their ingested traces live over a 15-minute rolling window, retain only the ones they need with flexible retention rules, and generate metrics from any span using any tag. This enables tracking of long-term trends in application performance and accurate measurement of system state. With Datadog's metric-based functionality, users can create span-based metrics to monitor their application's performance, graph these metrics on dashboards, configure alerts for potential issues, treat these metrics as service level indicators (SLIs) for establishing service level objectives (SLOs), and derive insights from all of their spans in a cost-effective way.