Tracing is a key component of observability, capturing a connected view of how requests travel through an application and allowing developers to understand how different components interact with each other. To analyze trace data effectively, we need powerful tools that can handle complex analytics, such as SQL. Observability is essentially an analytics problem, and leveraging SQL for trace analysis can unlock new insights to troubleshoot production issues faster and proactively improve applications. Promscale is an observability backend built on PostgreSQL and TimescaleDB, providing full SQL superpowers to solve even the most complex issues in distributed systems.