The Level 0 distributed trace coverage scorecard rule measures the percentage of your APM entities that generate distributed trace data. This foundational metric helps you assess the breadth of your distributed tracing implementation across your application stack.
What this rule measures
This scorecard rule calculates the percentage of APM entities in your environment that actively produce span data for distributed traces. An entity passes the rule when New Relic detects span data from that service or application.
The rule focuses specifically on:
- APM-instrumented services and applications
- Presence of distributed trace spans
- Coverage across your monitored entities
How to interpret your score
Your distributed trace coverage score represents the percentage of APM entities that are actively generating distributed trace data. Here's how to understand your results:
- High score (80-100%): Most of your APM entities are producing distributed trace data, indicating comprehensive coverage
- Medium score (50-79%): Moderate coverage with room for improvement in trace data collection
- Low score (0-49%): Limited distributed tracing implementation that may leave gaps in request flow visibility
ヒント
The goal isn't necessarily 100% coverage. Focus on ensuring that business-critical services and those with complex inter-service dependencies have distributed tracing enabled.
Recommended actions
Use these strategies to improve your distributed trace coverage score:
1. Assess service criticality and complexity
Work with your development and operations teams to:
- Identify business-critical services that handle important user workflows
- Map services with complex inter-service dependencies
- Prioritize services that frequently experience performance issues
2. Configure distributed tracing strategically
Focus your efforts on high-impact areas:
- Enable distributed tracing for critical services first
- Ensure services with known complex dependencies are instrumented
- Verify that parent services in request chains have tracing enabled
3. Validate span capture and quality
Review your current implementation:
- Confirm spans are being captured with complete context attributes
- Check that trace data includes relevant metadata for troubleshooting
- Verify spans contain sufficient detail for performance analysis
4. Document and track coverage
Maintain visibility into your progress:
- Create a coverage report showing which critical services have distributed tracing
- Identify gaps where additional APM agent deployments are needed
- Track improvements in coverage over time
5. Customize the rule for your environment
Tailor the scorecard to your specific needs:
- Apply tags to group services where distributed tracing is most important
- Modify the scorecard rule to focus on your tagged service cohort
- Exclude test or development services that don't require tracing
Important considerations
Keep these factors in mind when working with your distributed trace coverage score:
Customize for your environment: Scorecard rules provide general guidance, but your specific requirements may differ. Evaluate results in the context of your architecture, business priorities, and operational constraints.
Focus on continuous improvement: Distributed tracing strategies should evolve with your system architecture. Regularly review your coverage and adjust your approach as services are added, modified, or retired.
Balance coverage with performance: While comprehensive tracing provides better visibility, consider the performance impact on high-throughput services. You may need to adjust sampling rates or selectively enable tracing for specific services.
By understanding your distributed trace coverage score and implementing these recommendations, you can build a more effective observability strategy that provides the visibility you need while aligning with your business objectives.