# Trace views

The **Trace** view provides a visual timeline of your workflow execution, showing how different services interact and where time is spent. Specifically, a *distributed trace* is the timeline comprising all of the events between the generation of a request and the receipt of a response; these events can cross process, network and security boundaries. Distributed traces are key to understanding the path a request takes within your application.

## Permission required

To view traces and service logs, an administrator must enable [log access](../log-permissioning/index.md) for the relevant project. Users always have access to logs for their own executions from the past 24 hours, except on [CBAC stacks](../../security/classification-based-access-controls/index.md), where log access must be enabled to view trace and service logs.

## Key elements of the trace view

![Example Workflow Lineage with trace view](../../../assets/ec81b62209a0c64321d932d645d4fb397f782568456305a7d25d0f3e4c4f90bf.webp)

* **Timeline visualization:** Horizontal bars show the duration of each operation.
* **Service hierarchy:** Nested spans show parent-child relationships between operations.
* **Resource types:** Coloring indicating whether each span was produced from a function, action, automation, model, or LLM call.
* **Performance metrics:** Each span displays its execution time.

## Analyzing trace details

You can select any span to see the full **Trace Log Details** for that specific operation.

Trace details include:

* **Operation name:** The specific function, action, language model, automation, model, or inner operation being executed.
* **Duration:** Execution time for the operation.
* **Input/output data:** For Function execution requests, you can view the parameters passed to and returned from the operation.
* **Model interactions:** For LLM calls, you can view the prompt, response, and token usage.
* **Error information:** Stack traces and error messages for failed operations.
* **Trace identifiers:** `foundryTraceId`, the Foundry-assigned identifier used to fetch telemetry, and `x-b3-traceid`, the standard distributed-tracing identifier included in the **tags** field on each service log entry (best-effort; may be absent on logs originating outside Foundry, such as applications built with the Ontology SDK).

![Example Workflow Lineage with trace log details](../../../assets/03ae51add2d926bf7340b4103d9142b6fec63b922151e2a6d967529325c8f029.webp)

## Related features

* [Execution history](../run-history/index.md): View all recent executions before diving into traces.
* [Service logs](../service-logs-and-debugging/index.md): Access detailed log messages for each span.
* [Performance monitoring](../performance-monitoring-and-optimization/index.md): Analyze trace data to identify optimization opportunities.