Open a trace
From a log. Open any log in the detail drawer. If the log carries a trace ID, a Trace tab appears alongside the other tabs, showing the waterfall inline. Click through for the full page. By trace ID. Paste a trace ID — 32 hexadecimal characters — into the log search box. Rootprint recognizes it and opens that trace directly instead of running a search. Case does not matter here: the search box lowercases what you paste. An all-zeros ID falls through to a normal search, because OTLP writes that value on logs that carry no trace context. By URL. A trace has a permanent address at/traces/<traceId>. Share it like any other link. The URL and GET /api/traces/{traceId} both take the canonical form only — exactly 32 lowercase hex characters, not all zeros — and reject anything else with 400.
The waterfall
Each span is a bar positioned by its start offset and sized by its duration. Spans are colored by service, so a request crossing four services is four colors. The root span’s status is shown in the header, and spans that ended in an error are marked. Selecting a span opens its detail panel.Span details
The detail panel has three tabs. A tab with nothing in it is disabled and skipped when you move between spans with the keyboard.
Two attributes are hidden from the panel because they restate the span’s own error state, which the waterfall already shows:
otel.status_code and error. span.kind and otel.status_description are kept — they carry information nothing else displays.
Jump back to logs
A span links to the logs it produced, with a count. This is the reverse of opening a trace from a log: from a slow or failing span, you go straight to what that span logged. When a trace’s logs number 1,000 or more, Rootprint stops computing per-span counts and omits them; the trace-wide link back to logs still works.Truncated traces
A trace larger than 2,000 spans returns a subset, and the view says so. Because the underlying query is unsorted, the spans you get are an arbitrary subset rather than the first 2,000 by time — a truncated waterfall is not the beginning of the trace, it is a sample of it.Correlate logs with traces
Correlation in both directions depends on one per-index setting: Trace ID field.
The default matches the OpenTelemetry log schema, so the bundled
otel-logs-v0_9 index needs no configuration. For a custom schema, set this to wherever your trace ID lives — for example attributes.traceId — on the index’s Configuration tab under Settings → Indexes. See Manage indexes.
Until this points at a real field, logs and traces stay unlinked: no Trace tab in the log drawer, and no log counts on spans.