NerdGraph tutorial: View distributed trace details

You can use New Relic's NerdGraph GraphiQL explorer to query your distributed tracing data. This document explains:

Trace metadata that's only available with NerdGraph
Example queries of trace data

Trace metadata

In addition to span event and transaction event data, we calculate additional metadata about the trace and its span relationships. To query this metadata, go to the NerdGraph GraphiQL explorer at api.newrelic.com/graphiql.

Additional trace-level data:

Trace-level metadata	Description
`durationMs`	The duration of this trace in milliseconds.
`entities`	All entities that are part of this trace.
`entityCount`	The number of entities that are part of this trace.
`spanConnections`	Parent/child IDs that represent all of the span relationships within this trace.
`timestamp`	The trace's start time in milliseconds since the Unix epoch](https://currentmillis.com/).

Additional span-level data:

Span-level metadata	Description
`clientType`	For a client span, this indicates the type of entity called: `DATASTORE` or `EXTERNAL`.
`entityGuid`	The New Relic identifier for the entity that sent the span.
`processBoundary`	The position of a span with respect to the boundaries between processes: `ENTRY`, `EXIT`, or `IN_PROCESS`.
`spanAnomalies`	Anomalies detected for a span, compared to similar spans that occurred over the previous hours before this span occurred. Anomalous spans appear in the trace UI.

For more about trace structure and span relationships, see Trace structure.

Trace data query examples

Here are example NerdGraph queries of distributed tracing data:

This NerdGraph query example shows how to return all data for a trace by using a trace's traceId. Note that attributes is used to return Span event attributes.

{
  actor {
    distributedTracing {
      trace(traceId: "YOUR_TRACE_ID") {
        spans {
          attributes
          clientType
          durationMs
          entityGuid
          id
          name
          parentId
          processBoundary
          timestamp
          traceId
          spanAnomalies {
            anomalousValue
            anomalyType
            averageMeasure
          }
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

For more about trace structure and span relationships, see Trace structure.

This NerdGraph query example shows how to return trace-level metadata about the relationships between spans:

{
  actor {
    distributedTracing {
      trace(traceId: "YOUR_TRACE_ID") {
        id
        timestamp
        durationMs
        spanConnections {
          parent
          child
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

For more about trace structure and span relationships, see Trace structure.

This NerdGraph query example returns the entities associated with a trace and some data about those entities.

{
  actor {
    distributedTracing {
      trace(traceId: "YOUR_TRACE_ID") {
        entities {
          name
          tags {
            key
          }
          account {
            name
          }
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

NerdGraph tutorial: View distributed trace details

Trace metadata

Trace data query examples

Query by trace ID

Query span relationship data

Query data of the entities in a trace

NerdGraph tutorial: View distributed trace details

Trace metadata.css-21sua1{background:none;border:none;width:0;padding:0;}

Trace data query examples

Query span relationship data

Query data of the entities in a trace

Trace metadata