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Trace Viewer in Rill Developer

Rill Developer provides a built-in trace viewer, enabling users to visually inspect operations performed when reconciling resources or fetching data for dashboards. This helps in diagnosing performance and operational issues.

How to Use the Trace Viewer​

Step 1: Start Rill Developer with Debug Mode​

Launch Rill Developer with the debug flag enabled:

rill start --debug

Step 2: Access the Trace Viewer​

Open your web browser and navigate to:

http://localhost:9009/traces

Step 3: Visualize Traces​

You can visualize traces in two ways:

  • By Trace ID: Enter a specific Trace ID to inspect a particular operation.
  • By Resource Reconciliation: Browse operations associated with reconciling specific resources.

For example, if you want to view the operations performed during the reconciliation of the bids model, simply enter bids in the resource name field.

Understanding the Trace Graph​

  • Horizontal Bars: Each horizontal bar represents a distinct operation performed by Rill.
  • Bar Length: The length of each bar indicates the duration of the operation.
  • Operation Details: Click on any bar to view detailed tags and metadata in the pane on the right.
  • Nested Operations: Operations may trigger other sub-operations, displayed as nested bars beneath the parent operation.
  • Parallel Operations: Bars displayed side by side indicate operations executed concurrently.

Retrieving the Trace ID for Dashboard Data Fetch​

To find the Trace ID associated with fetching data for a dashboard:

  1. Open Browser Developer Tools: Use your browser's developer tools (usually F12 or Cmd+Option+I).
  2. Inspect API Requests: Select the API call you're interested in from the network tab.
  3. Find X-trace-id: Check the response headers to locate the X-trace-id.
  4. Use Trace ID: Enter this Trace ID into the trace viewer to inspect the operation details.

Inner Workings​

  • The Trace Viewer UI uses OpenTelemetry (OTEL) traces.
  • Traces are captured in JSON format and stored locally.
  • The UI retrieves and filters traces based on query parameters and trace type.