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Checklist · Tracing

Tracing Launch Checklist for 2026

Use this launch checklist to guide your tracing effort in 2026. Tasks are grouped into phases and prioritized so you always know what to do next. [Explore](/resources/launch-guides) the full guide for detailed playbooks.

9 checklist items Updated from migrated LaunchTry SEO content

Phase 01

Foundation

3 tasks
  • c1
    critical1 day

    Define goals and KPIs (Tracing)

    Define your trace sampling rates, retention windows and latency SLOs for the beginning.

  • c2
    medium1 week

    Identify target audience (Tracing)

    Identify which teams need tracing first—mobile, backend or frontend—and their top pain points.

  • c3
    critical1 day

    Audit current state (Tracing)

    Audit existing log sinks, APM coverage and instrumentation gaps in your codebase.

Phase 02

Execution

3 tasks
  • c4
    medium1 week

    Prioritize high-impact tasks (Tracing)

    Prioritize high-cardinality fields, service hops and error paths that cause the most support tickets.

  • c5
    medium1 week

    Assign owners and deadlines (Tracing)

    Assign oncall leads and set escalation runbooks for trace interpretation.

  • c6
    medium1 week

    Set up tracking (Tracing)

    Connect traces to your observability dashboards and set anomaly detection thresholds.

Phase 03

Launch & Review

3 tasks
  • c7
    high2-3 days

    Ship and verify (Tracing)

    Deploy tracing to production with canary rollout and compare latency impact vs. baseline.

  • c8
    critical1 day

    Measure against KPIs (Tracing)

    Run incident postmortems using traces and measure time-to-diagnosis improvement.

  • c9
    medium1 week

    Iterate on results (Tracing)

    Tune sampling rules, add custom spans and invest in trace query optimization.

Pro tips

  • Tackle critical items first
  • Review the checklist weekly
  • Adapt phases to your tracing context