Introduction to exemplars

Suppose your company website is experiencing a surge in traffic volumes. While more than eighty percent of the users are able to access the website in under two seconds, some users are experiencing a higher than normal response time resulting in bad user experience.

Use exemplars to help isolate problems within your data distribution by pinpointing query traces exhibiting high latency within a time interval. Once you localize the latency problem to a few exemplar traces, you can combine it with additional system based information or location properties to perform a root cause analysis faster, leading to quick resolutions to performance issues.

Grafana shows exemplars alongside a metric in the Explore view and in dashboards. Each exemplar displays as a highlighted star. You can hover your cursor over an exemplar to view the unique traceID, which is a combination of a key value pair. To investigate further, click the blue button next to the property.

Refer to View exemplar data for instructions on how to drill down and view exemplar trace details from metrics and logs. To know more about exemplars, refer to the blogpost .