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Trace Waterfall Explainer

Explain why a request was slow from its distributed trace.

Advanced22h1–2 people16/20 fit
TL;DR

Build Trace Waterfall Explainer for backend and sre teams in ~22h with 1–2 people. Stack: OpenTelemetry + Node.js + LLM.

Why it wins: Observability made understandable.

Build flow

01 · Problem
Trace waterfalls are hard to interpret across many services.
02 · Solution
Ingest OpenTelemetry traces, find the critical path, compare with normal traces and explain the slowdown in plain language.
03 · Build
  1. 1Instrument a sample app
  2. 2Collect traces
  3. 3Analyse spans
  4. 4Explain
04 · Demo
Show a slow request where the database span is called out.

MVP checklist

  • Trace ingest
  • Critical path
  • Baseline compare
  • Explanation

Tech stack

TechRole
OpenTelemetryTraces + metrics
Node.jsBackend runtime
LLMLanguage model

Reference repos

Open-source projects you can build on. Links checked 2026-10-31.

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