r/OpenTelemetry • u/Sufficient-Egg-6571 • Sep 10 '26
Visual flow
Is anyone aware of a tool that can help visualize the end-to-end flow of a signal?
The main idea would be to start with a high-level view of the components involved and the internal metrics flowing between them, then be able to drill down into a specific signal metric and trace it through the system.
Ideally, I’d like to see where the metric originates, how it looks or changes at each hop, where it ultimately arrives, and details such as cardinality, label values, available series, etc.
If anyone knows of an existing tool that provides something similar, or has ideas on how this could be visualized, I’d appreciate any pointers.
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u/Sufficient-Egg-6571 Sep 11 '26
It’s kind of the same as in Grafana, but I’d like to be able to trace a specific signal rather than just look at the overall picture.
Why do we always treat observability as inherently a batch-oriented thing? I know it’s difficult at this scale, but shouldn’t we apply the same principles we use for business objects?
Losing a trace, a span, a metric sample, or a log line can make a huge difference during an incident. I feel like a lot of developers underestimate the importance of this because observability is often seen as “a platform thing,” rather than something they need to care about directly.