dt-obs-tracing

dt-obs-tracing is an observability reference skill for analyzing distributed traces and spans in Dynatrace using DQL (Dynatrace Query Language) against Traces in Grail. It helps investigate span-level details, request failures, performance bottlenecks, and trace correlation, and is scoped to trace analysis specifically (deferring service RED metrics, log search, and problem analysis to sibling skills).

The skill explains trace fundamentals such as span kinds (server, client, consumer, producer, internal), root spans, and key attributes like trace.id, span.id, duration, and service identifiers, then supplies ready-to-run DQL query patterns for common use cases: finding slow requests over a latency threshold, analyzing failures by reason (HTTP code, gRPC status, exception, span status, custom rule), mapping service dependencies, and correlating logs with traces. Reference files go deep on span types (HTTP, RPC/gRPC, database, messaging, serverless), failure detection, exception and stack-trace analysis, request attributes, networking analysis, entity lookups, and sampling/extrapolation via adaptive traffic management. The queries are read-only fetch/filter/summarize/parse operations that report and aggregate telemetry.

It targets SREs, platform engineers, and developers who use Dynatrace and need to author trace queries to diagnose production issues. It is defensive, monitoring-oriented tooling that only reads and summarizes observability data; it contains no destructive operations, credential handling, or offensive capability.