OpenTelemetry in the UI: Summary page

After you've sent us your OpenTelemetry data and opened your service (entity) in the UI, the Summary page offers an overview of your service's health. Here you can see:

• The golden signals for your service: response time, throughput, and error rate
• Entities this service depends on, with their health status, appear in Related entities. This includes other services communicating with this service and the infrastructure hosting the service.
• When alerting thresholds are violated, those events appear in the Activity sidebar

By using this information, you can quickly decide whether there's a problem with this service and where you can begin diagnosing the problem.

How OpenTelemetry data shows up (server or client?)

The Summary page shows the golden signals for the server and/or message consumer roles of a service. Other pages offer different views of the service's roles in your distributed system:

• External services shows the service's behavior as a client calling other services, as well as a breakdown of how other services call its endpoints
• Databases shows the service's behavior as a client of databases, specifically

Services can be both servers (responding to requests) and clients (making requests) in the OpenTelemetry data model for tracing. Similarly, services using messaging systems like AWS SQS can be producers and/or consumers of messages. The span.kind attribute specifies the role of the service in a given tracing span.

Metrics or spans

You can choose to use either metrics or spans to power the charts for the golden signals.

Required attributes

For your OpenTelemetry data to appear in the Summary page, make sure it has the following attributes, in accordance with the OTel semantic conventions:

To learn about OpenTelemetry in other UI pages, see the UI overview.