Google releases its Cloud Trace service for tracking app performance

The Google Cloud Trace web service for diagnosing hiccups in developers’ applications is now available for all to use, Google said today.

Google first unveiled the service in June, at its Google I/O conference in San Francisco.

“With Google Cloud Trace, you can diagnose performance issues in your production application by quickly finding the traces for slow requests and viewing a detailed report of where time is spent in your application while processing these requests,” Google product manager Pratul Dublish wrote in a blog post on the news today. “Its trace analysis feature allows you to see the latency distribution for your application, and find the painfully slow requests that may be affecting only a small number of your users. You can also use the trace analysis feature to check if the performance of a new release is better than the previous release.”

With that range of capability, Google has pulled off a worthy feat in the hotly competitive public cloud industry — the offering of a distinct service that can help developers rest assured that their applications are working in the best possible way. And if they aren’t, the service can assist in the troubleshooting process.

The thing is, Google isn’t making Cloud Trace available for developers to use with applications living on other public clouds — as it has done with the Google Cloud Monitoring service by way of the Stackdriver acquisition. There’s good sense in helping people run applications on multiple public clouds, especially Amazon’s public cloud. But then again, unlike the Cloud Monitoring service, Cloud Trace didn’t originally start by supporting Amazon.

Cloud Trace, for its part, allows users to bring up logs for specific application requests and generate reports on latency for requests, among other capabilities, according to the documentation for the feature.