Collect traces from your intrumented applications to gain end-to-end visibility into your applications. Query and visualize distributed traces from the Trace Explorer, understand how requests flow through your microservices and easily investigate errors and performance issues.

With APM, both the ingestion and the retention of traces are fully customizable.

Ingestion mechanisms

Set up tracing to gain end-to-end visibility into your applications with fine-grained ingestion configuration. Make sure to capture complete traces, including all error and high-latency traces to never miss performance issues such as an application outage or an unresponsive service.

Ingestion controls

The Ingestion Control page overviews ingestion volumes and configuration settings across your services.

Generating metrics from spans

You can generate metrics from ingested spans, and use those custom metrics for queries and comparisons. Learn more in Generating Metrics from Spans.

Trace retention

After spans are ingested, Retention Filters determine which individual spans are indexed and stored for 15 days. The Datadog Intelligent Retention Filter automatically indexes a representative selection of spans to help you monitor application health. You can also define custom retention filters to index additional spans that are important for your organization’s goals.

Trace usage metrics

Learn about how to track and monitor your volume of ingested and indexed data, including using the APM Estimated Usage and Ingestion Reasons dashboards, by reading Usage Metrics.