Join the new Helios product community on Slack!

SANDBOX

SECURITY

OBSERVABILITY

LANGUAGES

USE CASES

RESOURCES

New video: How to visualize your traces – Tracing tools and new ideas

Written by


Subscribe to our Blog

Get the Latest News and Content

What is trace-based visualization? In microservices, distributed tracing is a method for aggregating all the operations that occur in your distributed systems that were triggered by a specific request. If these traces are visualized, developers can gain insights into how their service behaves when it’s run with other services, which helps them understand why errors occur.

In a new video, Aviv Kerbel, our developer advocate, shows how to visualize traces and then use the results to investigate issues, reproduce scenarios and generate tests for your cloud-native applications with Helios, which is a free developer tool. This blog post covers the main steps. You can also watch the entire video here.

How to Visualize Traces in Helios

1. First, sign up for Helios. It has a free tier and you can use it to visualize your traces and investigate issues.

When you open Helios, you will see all the services Helios is installed on and the entry points for each specific service.

2. To see all the traces for a specific entry point, select the preferred entry point.

3. You can expand the trace to get more details about the trace. You will be able to see errors, attributes, payloads, logs, how the data flows in the system, and more.

In the example, you can see the request attributes. There was a call to Postgres and a Kafka message broker. We can also see there is an error.

4. To understand why the error occurred, you can drill down into the error logs. As you can see, there was a Stripe request that failed. Now, you can go back to your code and resolve the issue!

Once this issue is resolved, we want to visualize the trace once again, just to make sure.

5. As you can see, the same Stripe request that had previously failed, now succeeded.

Instead of combing through logs, Helios helped us quickly identify the error so we can fix it.
Additional capabilities trace visualization capabilities that are supported by Helios include:

  • Seeing the duration of each span:

Seeing the commit hash of each service:

Ready to get started? Start today!

Subscribe to our Blog

Get the Latest News and Content

About Helios

Helios is an applied observability platform that produces actionable security and monitoring insights. We apply our deep runtime data collection capabilities to help Sec, Dev, and Ops teams understand the actual application risk posture, prioritize vulnerabilities, shorten troubleshooting time, and reduce MTTR.

The Author

Aviv Kerbel
Aviv Kerbel

Aviv Kerbel is Dev Advocate at Helios. Aviv is an experienced developer and R&D leader. Prior to Helios Aviv served as an associate at Amiti, an Israel-based VC, where he was involved in due diligence and investment processes in tech startups. Before that Aviv worked as a senior software developer in multiple startups and in the 8200 intelligence unit of the IDF. Aviv is passionate about development in modern environments and trending dev tools, and he always stays on top of the most recent relevant technologies.

Related Content