All about span events: what they are and how to query them

Span events, as unique points within a span's duration, provide additional granularity in distributed tracing, offering valuable insights for debugging and performance optimization without significantly increasing trace sizes. Unlike span attributes, span events can store timestamps, allowing precise performance monitoring and structured logging. They are especially useful for error tracking, as they integrate with spans to form comprehensive traces that capture the sequence of actions leading to errors. TraceQL, a query language for Grafana Cloud Traces, now includes support for querying span events, enabling users to search for specific event names and attributes, thus enhancing monitoring and troubleshooting capabilities. The recent enhancements to TraceQL offer richer sampling capabilities, allowing selective data capture and improved application performance monitoring.