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Get Started with APM & Distributed Tracing

APM & Distributed Tracing in SigNoz gives you end-to-end visibility into your application's health and request flow. Monitor service-level RED metrics (Rate, Errors, Duration) and trace individual requests as they travel across microservices.

APM traces workflow: Services list → Application Details → context menu → Traces Explorer
APM traces workflow — from Services list to Traces Explorer

Key capabilities

  • APM/Services: Monitor every service with latency percentiles, error rates, requests per second, and Apdex scores, with database call and external call breakdowns.
  • Trace Explorer: Search and filter traces by service, operation, duration, or any span attribute.
  • Distributed tracing: Follow a single request across all microservices with a flamegraph view that shows every span, its duration, and parent-child relationships.
  • Trace funnels: Analyze how requests flow through a sequence of services or spans and identify drop-off points.
  • Service map: Visualize dependencies between services and spot latency or error hot-spots across your architecture.

Get started

  • Send traces to SigNoz — Instrument your services with OpenTelemetry.
  • APM metrics from traces — Understand how SigNoz derives RED metrics from trace data automatically.

Work with APM & Tracing

  • View Services — RED metrics, Apdex, and per-service performance overview.
  • Database Calls — Latency and call counts for database operations.
  • External Calls — Outbound HTTP and gRPC call metrics.
  • Trace Explorer — Search and filter individual traces by service, operation, duration, or attributes.
  • Trace Details — Flamegraph view for a single trace with span-level attributes and events.
  • Service Map — Visualize service dependencies and error hot-spots.
  • Trace Funnels — Analyze request flow across a sequence of services.

Concepts and reference

  • Querying Traces — Query traces using Query Builder, Trace Matching, and ClickHouse SQL.
  • APM Metrics, Dashboards & Alerts — Build custom dashboards and alerts from APM data.
  • Long Term Storage — Configure hot and cold storage tiers for traces.
  • Using Traces API — Query traces programmatically via the API.
  • Control Traces Volume — Drop unwanted spans to reduce costs.
  • Correlate Traces & Logs — Link traces with logs for unified debugging.

Related modules

  • Logs Management — Correlate traces with logs.
  • Metrics — Explore metrics alongside trace data.
  • Dashboards — Build custom views from APM data.
  • Alerts — Alert on latency, error rate, or Apdex.

Last updated: May 20, 2026

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