The trace is the alert.
No alert leaves without the failing request attached. A page with no trace is a bug in our product, not a feature.
00 / 05 · About
Every alert arrives with its trace. The slow hop is already named. That is the product. Everything else serves it.
01 / 05 · The problem
A request crosses seven services. Your alert knows one.
Latency crossed a line. The page names the endpoint and stops there. Nothing about which service held the request.
Someone greps by timestamp. Someone else guesses at a deploy. Clocks disagree between services. Twenty minutes go by.
The fix took four minutes. Finding it took the rest of the night. We built Wayfinder’s Thread to delete the middle step.
02 / 05 · Principles
They decide what gets built. They decide what gets cut.
No alert leaves without the failing request attached. A page with no trace is a bug in our product, not a feature.
Servers come and go. A request has a start, a path and an end. We model that.
Mute windows, SLO burn rates and deploy context keep the noise down. A page should mean someone acts.
Three plans, billed annually. The tier sets endpoints and retention. The core tracing stays the same.
FIG.01 — support.queue · help center
03 / 05 · How it’s built
Support is staffed by the people who write the agent. A question about span naming reaches someone who knows why spans are named that way.
The agent is small and tuned to stay out of your request path. Probes run from 25 regions on a one-minute loop. Traces stay on your plan’s retention clock, then they’re gone.
04 / 05 · Where it’s going
What we are working on. Plans change when you tell us something we missed.
Per-field resolver timing inside a single query, so one slow resolver stops hiding in a fast gateway.
BuildingBurn-rate alerts that name the deploy before the budget runs dry, not after.
NextWider language and runtime coverage, so a trace never breaks at a service we can’t see into.
NextSend a read-only trace to a vendor whose service is the slow hop.
Later05 / 05 · Your move
Three plans. One thread. Tonight’s first slow request shows its whole route.
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