Chronosphere has added tracing capabilities to its platform for monitoring today’s complex technology stacks at large scale. This allows users to correlate traces with metrics, adding contextual information to alerts and dashboards in order to reduce the amount of time it takes to resolve production issues.

The new feature is based on open source and CNCF technologies including OpenTelemetry, OpenMetrics and M3, all three of which Chronosphere contributes to.

Chronosphere’s solution is said to deeply link the traces and metrics from the moment they are emitted. The trace identifiers are stored right next to the metric values in Chronosphere’s metrics storage system M3. When a user receives an alert or views their dashboard, the very traces that constituted those metric values are displayed instantly. This saves valuable minutes during an outage and helps users identify and mitigate issues much faster, the company said.

Chronosphere achieves cost efficiency by leveraging their existing metrics aggregation tier to selectively store unique traces. This allows users to both find that needle in a haystack – the one in a thousand error or slow request – while using a fraction of the storage.