Question

A user-facing API running on GKE intermittently returns HTTP 500 errors. Your team has structured JSON logs in Cloud Logging that include a 'trace' field populated with the X-Cloud-Trace-Context ID, and distributed tracing is enabled with Cloud Trace. During an incident, you find a specific log entry showing a 500 error and want to immediately see the full end-to-end request path—including the downstream service calls and their latencies—that produced this error. What is the most efficient way to accomplish this?

Accepted Answer

In the Logs Explorer, click the log entry and use the trace correlation link, which opens the associated trace in Cloud Trace showing the full span breakdown of the request.

Answer

Create a log-based counter metric filtered on HTTP 500 responses and view its rate over time in a Cloud Monitoring dashboard.

Answer

Export the logs to BigQuery and run a query joining on the timestamp field to approximate which downstream calls occurred at the same moment.

Answer

Enable Cloud Profiler on the service to capture the CPU flame graph for the time window in which the error occurred.