Explore common components

Explore spans shares four core components with the rest of Explore—the same query builder, side bar of fields, count chart, and results table render across the Spans, Traces, and Flows tabs and across other Explore surfaces like Explore Logs. Understanding these components helps you move faster through any investigation, regardless of which tab or data type you're working with.

At a glance

Result table

The Result table lists the rows that match your current query. Each row represents a single span in the Spans tab or a single trace in the Traces tab. Columns are tab-specific and can be added, removed, and reordered through Manage columns.

Row, cell, and key actions include:

• Include in query — add the field-value pair as an inclusion filter.
• Exclude from query — add the field-value pair as an exclusion filter.
• Copy value — copy the value to the clipboard.
• Copy full path — copy the full field path, including parent keys.
• Add as a column — add the field as a new column in the table.
• Show the graph for the key — open a time-series chart of the key.
• Add as grouping — group results by the field.

Sort any column ascending or descending by selecting its header—useful for sorting by duration or error count. Use Export to save the result set as JSON or CSV. Select a row to open the drilldown drawer.

In the Traces tab, the table also surfaces a trace duration breakdown by service for each row—for example, Cumulative span duration: 211.17ms shows the sum of all span durations in the trace.

For the full list of columns, actions, and export behavior in the Spans and Traces tabs, see Spans, Traces, and Flows. For the logs equivalent, see Logs grid.

Query builder

The query builder is a no-code interface for filters, aggregations, and groupings. In Explore spans it adds tracing-specific controls:

• Span duration filter (ms or percentile). Trace duration is not currently supported.
• Error toggles for spans and traces.
• Order by, Limit, and Having for grouped results.

For span-specific filters, see Query builder for spans. For the full reference of shared builder primitives, see Query builder.

Graphs

A Count Spans over time chart sits above the results table and updates with your active query and time range. Each bar shows the number of spans in a time bucket, with the legend on the right summarizing the total count for the selected window. Use the chart to spot volume trends before drilling into individual spans.

Hover any bar to inspect the count for that bucket, drag across a time window to zoom, or select a data point to include or exclude the value in the query and to open the drilldown drawer on a representative span.

For the chart configuration shared across Explore (chart types, scale, time bucket, legend, drag-to-zoom), see Visualize.

Fields

The side bar on the left lists fields and tags, grouped by OpenTelemetry semantic convention. Grouping fields by domain sections makes it faster to find the right filter without knowing the exact field name. Field filters stay in sync with the query builder—changes in either place propagate to the other.

Core filters sit at the top of the side bar: Service, Application, Subsystem, Operation name, and Span kind.

Fields by section lists span fields and tags below Core, grouped by domain: HTTP, database, messaging, cache, Gen AI, RUM, object storage, serverless, Spark/Airflow/Dbt, infrastructure, network, runtime, and others.

Use the field-level more actions menu to:

• Search values within a field.
• Filter in or Filter out a value.
• Show more values when the list is truncated.
• Sort fields by popularity or unique-value count.

Use the search box at the top of the side bar to find a field by name when you have hundreds of attributes.

For the full Fields reference shared across Explore, see Fields.

Next steps

See how the Spans, Traces, and Flows tabs render your results in Spans, Traces, and Flows.