getsentry / getsentry/sentry

Feature Request: Topology Graph

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Explore > Traces Product Area: Explore Type: Feature Request
Dominant language
Python
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Description

Problem Statement

Sentry has spans and distributed tracing for a while now. It would be very useful to provide a way to see how each service (or project) are connected in a very big picture. One way of achieving that is through topology graph.

Solution Brainstorm

Jaeger has this:

https://www.jaegertracing.io/docs/2.16/features/#topology-graphs
https://demo.jaegertracing.io/jaeger/dependencies

A trace waterfall follows the path of a single request through your system — you can see each service it hit, in what order, and how long each hop took.

A topology graph zooms out: it aggregates across all your traces to build a map of your entire system, showing which services talk to each other and where the hottest paths (highest traffic or latency) are.

Think of it like: the waterfall is one car's GPS route, the topology graph is the traffic heat map of the whole city.

It gives you a high-level view of your system — the components that make it up, the hot paths between them, which parts are most error-prone, and how services depend on each other (so you can reason about blast radius when something goes wrong).

Signoz has a very similar feature: https://signoz.io/docs/userguide/service-map/

As well as Honeycomb: https://www.honeycomb.io/platform/service-map


Internal Slack thread: https://sentry.slack.com/archives/C08SBFDKBKJ/p1773347557420019

Product Area

Explore

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start by reviewing the linked Jaeger, SigNoz, and Honeycomb topology or service-map examples, along with the internal Slack thread. Define the Explore experience and the data needed to show service connections, traffic or latency hotspots, errors, and dependencies; done requires an agreed product and implementation scope.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Domain
observability
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Quiet
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
25/100

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