Users report long load times for specific URLs in your GKE-hosted microservices. You must find which HTTP requests have high latency spans. What should you do?

Instrumenting services with OpenTelemetry allows for distributed tracing, which is essential for identifying latency bottlenecks in microservices. OpenTelemetry captures detailed span information for each request as it traverses different services, and sending these traces to Cloud Trace provides a centralized platform for visualization and analysis. Cloud Trace can then show which specific HTTP requests and their internal operations (spans) are contributing most to the reported long load times. Configuring GKE workload metrics primarily provides resource utilization data (CPU, memory) at the pod level, not detailed HTTP request latency by URL path. Logging HTTP methods and URLs to stdout and routing to Cloud Logging can show request frequency but lacks the detailed timing information across service boundaries needed to pinpoint latency within a request's lifecycle. Installing tcpdump is a low-level network analysis tool that is overly complex and impractical for continuous monitoring and identifying application-level latency across distributed microservices.