Select a Service

First off you have select a service to lookup by. All traces are indexed by service names. Once that is done you have three options to pick from. See notes on each below.

Lookup by span name

Span names are generally thrift method names or Rails endpoints. This allows you to look up traces that accessed a particular part of the service.

Lookup by annotation

An annotation is a point in time in the trace. It is assigned a string value, this is what you can look up by in this field. Could be things like finagle.timeout

Lookup by key/value

Key / value annotations are just extra metadata attached to a trace. This could be things like the url hit, response codes or exceptions. See below for a few examples.

Key Value
request.uri /1/trends/available.json?lang=no
http.responsecode 500 Internal Server Error
Dates and limits

VMSM allows you to pick a point in time to help us guide the selection of traces. When doing a lookup we return traces before that point in time up until the limit number of results.