🔌 Plugin: Distributed Tracing

[iblancasa]

🔖 Summary

The goal of this plugin is enhance the usability of Backstage through various ways of depicting distributed tracing.
It would be a generic plugin that could be integrated with different distributed tracing storages.

This issue supersedes #253 because this proposal is to create something more generic than just focused on one tracing storage.

I started working on a first version of the plugin and will send a proposal soon.

🌐 Project website (if applicable)

https://grafana.com/oss/tempo/
https://www.jaegertracing.io/
https://zipkin.io/

✌️ Context

Distributed tracing is essential for understanding the interactions between services in complex, microservices-based applications. As organizations adopt distributed architectures, they often rely on tracing tools like Grafana Tempo, Jaeger, or Zipkin to gain insights into service performance and root causes of latency or errors.

This plugin will bridge the gap between tracing data and the Backstage developer portal, bringing observability closer to developers by allowing them to view trace data directly within Backstage. The initial version will focus on Grafana Tempo, with planned support for other backends. The implementation will include abstractions to facilitate this future extensibility, ensuring the plugin remains backend-agnostic while maintaining compatibility across tracing systems.

👀 Have you spent some time to check if this plugin request has been raised before?

• I checked and didn't find similar issue

✍️ Are you willing to maintain the plugin?

• I understand the responsibilities as a Plugin Maintainer Governance & will maintain the plugin

🏢 Have you read the Code of Conduct?

• I have read the Code of Conduct

Are you willing to submit PR?

Yes I am willing to submit a PR!

[vinzscam]

it would be a great addition, indeed