🔍 How to understand relationship between multiple services

Added: 2026-05-16

[00:00:00]5 seconds challenge. Which telemetry  type is best for understanding casual relationships between services?  A matrix, B logs or C traces.

[00:00:22]So the correct answer here is C traces.  So matrix and logs does not give you the complete information. So for example  logs as we know that if you have a service the logs will generate for that service for  example how many users are logged in logged out that kind of information and also information  about errors warnings or info and metrics on the other hand gives you the information about for  example CPU load or the memory load or for example number of pages viewed if you have instrumented  that part of code to get the metrics. So you can get this kind of information but if you have like  a multiple services or like a distributed services and if the user has to go from A to B then you  need to get the complete information for that journey and for that traces is being used. Here's  an example that where we have like a front end and it has like multiple microservices and you  can see like it is connected to one another.

[00:01:20]So basically it's connected like A to B,  B to C. So basically this is where the tracing can be used and for example you can use  Grafana where you can get all the information and breakdown like about the services the spans  it has created and then with that spans you can connect the dots by using the tracing trace ID and  so on. So for example you can get the information and also error information. So for example I can  see some errors here and if I click on view trace I can get this waterflow model. So for  example why that particular error happened and you can see that it is coming from an  authentication service and then we can see spend attributes where we can get the more information  that for that particular service service ABC is fine but the service D is for the authentication  and this is the target where it has failed and this is something you need to investigate.  So this is where the tracing comes very handy.