Community Session: Optimize your Website with Tracing

Hey everyone, welcome to this week's Versell community live session. I'm Amy. I'm on the community team here at Verscell and I'm going to be your moderator for today's session. Um, if you don't see the chat, make sure that you're signed in and click going on the event details. Or if you're tuning in from X, make sure that you join us at community.vercell.com/events and then

you can find us and uh, click going on the events. U, before we begin, I want to remind everyone of our community code of conduct. You can find that link up in the sitenav and down in the footer. and let's just continue to keep it a positive and respectful environment for everybody so we can keep doing these events. Um, if you're comfortable sharing in the chat where you're listening from, let us know. We'd love to see where everyone's tuning in from. Um, and feel free to share any comments or questions that you have uh during the session. We'll share those all at the

end and kind of discuss them with the group. Uh, if there's uh anything else, just make sure that you comment and bring it up with us. Um, with that all out of the way, uh, let me introduce Verselians Sam, Witz, and Andrew who are here to talk about session tracing. Hey everybody. Thanks, Amy. Hey, everyone. Uh, we are some of the team behind session tracing at Verscell. Um, this

was truly a cross team effort. Uh, but to introduce myself, my name is Sam. I'm a product manager at Verscell and I work on the dashboard and toolbar. Um, and I was the product manager on this session tracing effort. Uh, Gadik, do you want to intro yourself next? Sure. Thanks, Sam. I'm Andrew Gadzik. I'm a software engineer at Verscell, one of the primary engineers working on tracing. Nice to meet everyone. Witz. And I'm Witz. Uh, I was the front-end engineer and the designer for

the tracing project and more broadly just another software engineer here at Verscell. Great. All right. I've got some content for you all, some slides. So, I'm going to go ahead and share and we will talk through uh session tracing the feature. Um, as well as start off with a little intro on what tracing is. Um, and we'll talk about why we built session tracing at Verscell, the story behind it, and give you a demo of what it looks like to debug with session tracing. So to start

off, Gadzik, um will you run us through kind of tracing 101? What is tracing? Yeah, absolutely. So for those that don't know what tracing is, tracing just allows us to track a single request as it moves through various components of a distributed system. It provides visibility into how much time is spent in total. Um yeah how tracing works trace is just cons um consists of multiple spans organized in a parent child relationships. Each span represents a specific operation. Uh it captures its

duration, any errors that might have occurred and any relevant custom attributes that you'd like to track. And why does it matter? Um, tracing quickly point pinpoints performance bottlenecks and errors, significantly reducing trouble troubleshooting time. Tracing provides visibility into interactions between different services, making it easier to diagnose complex systemwide issues and tracing highlights

areas for optimization, allowing developers to efficiently enhance overall system performance. Sweet. Thank you. Yeah. So, tracing as a concept uh some of you know this, some of you might not, but tracing is a a type of data that is commonly used for observability um by people who build on the web. Um session tracing is Versel's first tracing related um product offering. And so I'm going to talk a little bit about what Verscell sessions tracing is in particular. So, we'll talk