Google Cloud Trace Goes Into Beta

Google Cloud Trace, which was first announced at Google I/O back in June, is finally heading into its beta release. The new tool was designed to diagnose service performance bottlenecks to help ensure applications can run at optimal speed.

“Here at Google, we understand the importance of having applications run at optimal speed. Awesome performance of your application is critical for end user satisfaction and retention. User expectations for application performance are already high and applications with poor performance risk losing users,” wrote Pratul Dublish, product manager at Google, in a blog post.

Going on the (correct) assumption that users have little patience for under-performing cloud services, Google is hoping Cloud Trace will give developers a feather in their cap as they look for ways to improve the performance of the applications they’re rolling out on Google Cloud Platform.

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“Ask any developer who has experienced the stress of diagnosing performance issues in production and you will find that it is extremely difficult to isolate the root cause of poor performance when it happens. This is especially true when the sluggish behavior is only seen by a small fraction of your users,” Dublish added.

Google Cloud Trace was designed so users can diagnose performance issues in production applications by “quickly finding the traces for slow requests and viewing a detailed report of where time is spent in your application while processing these requests.”

The trace analysis feature provides visibility into the latency distribution of applications. The end goal is to offer the ability to view detailed reports as to where time is spent in applications while processing requests and to check if the performance of a new release is better than previous releases.

Potentially, it’s a powerful tool, particularly for cloud application developers. It could enable developers to make great strides in improving the performance of their applications on Google’s cloud.