---
title: "What the waterfall told you | Grafana Labs"
description: "Recap what the span waterfall told you, and find the two doors that open next: TraceQL and cross-signal correlation."
---

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

# What the waterfall told you

You just opened a real trace and read it yourself, start to finish, with no setup. Reading a trace and understanding what it tells you is the core skill, and it transfers to any trace on any surface.

Here’s what you pulled out of the span waterfall:

- Took in the trace’s shape at a glance.
- Followed the parent and child nesting to see which call ran inside which.
- Read the durations and found where the request spent its time.
- Learned to open a span and read its attributes to tell what that step did.

Two doors open from here:

- **A query language for finding traces on purpose.** You ran a ready-made TraceQL query to land on your practice traces. When your questions get specific, like “failed checkout requests slower than two seconds,” TraceQL is how you pin them down.
- **Connecting a trace to your other signals.** A trace is even more useful next to the logs and metrics from the same request. You’ll get a lot more out of a trace once you connect it to those signals, but you have to set that up first.

* * *

### Related paths

Consider these paths after you complete this journey:

- [Use Traces Drilldown to identify high latency service requests](/docs/learning-paths/drilldown-traces/): investigate your own traces with a queryless workflow
- [Send traces to Grafana Cloud using Alloy](/docs/learning-paths/send-traces-alloy/): get your own traces flowing
- [Visualize traces in a Grafana Cloud dashboard](/docs/learning-paths/visualization-traces/): build trace dashboards and learn TraceQL

* * *

### More to explore (optional)

- [Trace structure](/docs/tempo/latest/introduction/trace-structure/)
- [TraceQL cookbook](/docs/grafana-cloud/observe-and-act/send-data/traces/traces-query-editor/traceql-cookbook/): copy-paste query recipes to find traces on purpose
- [Traces in Explore](/docs/grafana/latest/explore/trace-integration/)
- [Traces Drilldown](/docs/grafana-cloud/visualizations/simplified-exploration/traces/)

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