Traces

Rootprint ingests OpenTelemetry spans over OTLP and pairs them with your logs. A log carrying a trace ID opens the trace it belongs to, and every span in that trace links back to the logs it produced. A trace opens as a waterfall. Spans are colored by service, the header carries the root operation and total duration, and selecting a span opens its details beside the waterfall. Logs for this trace jumps to the logs those spans produced.

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The span store

Every span goes into one Quickwit index, the span store, named by the TRACE_INDEX_ID environment variable. It defaults to otel-traces-v0_9. Spans always land there regardless of which index the ingest key was created against. There is no per-key span destination. The span store is not readable as a log index. The log explorer, histogram, field-values, and export endpoints all reject it with 404.

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How you reach a trace

There are exactly two ways in:

• From a log. Open a log in the detail drawer and switch to the Trace tab.
• By trace ID. Paste a trace ID — 32 hexadecimal characters — into the log search box.

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Trace retention and time ranges

Opening a trace runs a raw trace_id search with no time bound, so a trace stays openable for as long as its spans are retained. The search window you had applied to your logs does not limit it.

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Limits

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Requirements

• Quickwit 0.9.0 or later. See Environment variables.
• An ingest API key. Any existing key works — you do not create a separate one for spans.

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Next steps