---
title: "Introduction to tracing | Grafana Labs"
description: "Learn what a distributed trace is, where tracing fits among your other signals, the four-stage tracing pipeline, and how to read a trace in Grafana, without setting anything up."
---

> For a curated documentation index, see [llms.txt](/llms.txt). For the complete documentation index, see [llms-full.txt](/llms-full.txt).

# Introduction to tracing

Learn what a distributed trace is, where tracing fits among your other signals, the four-stage tracing pipeline, and how to read a trace in Grafana, without setting anything up.

Journey

A journey is a guided series of sections that builds up a topic in depth and is more comprehensive than a path, which covers one focused task.

Slides

17

Duration

23 min

[Start journey](/docs/learning-hub/intro-to-tracing/01-intro/01-journey-overview/)