Understand the third‑party HTTP APIs, gRPC/RPC services, and datastores your service calls out to — and where they add latency or errors to a request.

Where external calls appear

  • External Service attribute — server.address is shown as External Service on operation/segment tables — the target host/endpoint you called.
  • Operation → Segment Breakdown — downstream segments (gRPC, HTTP client, DB, external HTTP) with Avg Latency and Avg Throughput — see Web Operations Insights.
  • Client spans — in the waterfall, outbound calls appear as client spans (HTTP/RPC), colored by category (e.g. RPC Systems).
  • Service Map — edges to external/downstream nodes with latency/throughput — see Service Map and Topology.

How to analyze an external dependency

  1. Open the calling service’s Web Operations (or Databases/Messaging) → the slow operation → Segment Breakdown: the external segment’s latency tells you whether the third‑party call is the bottleneck.
  2. View Traces → a span → waterfall: the outbound client span shows the exact External Service (server.address), duration, status, and any error events.
  3. Service Map confirms the dependency edge and its aggregate latency/error rate.