Back-end traces

A back-end trace is a collection of back-end spans. Back-end spans are calls that microservices make to each other, such as an account service making a request to a database.

Call stack

A call stack is the data structure used by a machine to keep track of which methods are currently being called. When the active call stack is sampled, the result is a stack trace.

Flame graph

The flame graph is a visual representation of a collection of stack traces. See Understand and use the flame graph.

Stack trace

A stack trace is a sampled snapshot of the call stack. The stack trace contains metadata such as the class name, method name, and line number in the call stack for a given thread. For example, AlwaysOn Profiling captures a stack trace for every running thread in the Java Virtual Machine, excluding those that are not relevant. When stack traces are sampled across all virtual machine threads, the result is a thread dump.

Traces and spans

A trace is a collection of operations that represents a unique transaction handled by an application and its constituent services. A span is a single operation within a trace. A session is made up of a collection of spans and traces. For more information, see Manage services, spans, and traces in Splunk APM.