In part 2 of this 4 part series, you’ll learn how to instrument your NodeJS application to capture custom method-level spans, allowing visibility into how specific methods behave in your application. Flame graphs allow for deep insight into the performance of your code. During instrumentation, we can capture custom spans for deeper layers of visibility in the resulting flame graphs. In this video, we use instrumentation to capture a method-level span, allowing us to see the performance of that specific method in our flame graphs in the Datadog UI.

In part 4 of this 4 part series, you’ll learn how to add Analyzed Spans to your traces to open up even more data search and aggregation capabilities via App Analytics. In this video, we will walk you through how you can turn any span into an Analyzed Span. Analyzed Spans function like the root spans of a trace, allowing us to turn the tags embedded in them into facets for advanced data aggregation and searching in App Analytics. You can check out how to add tags to spans—and how to utilize them in App Analytics—in our first video of the series here.

In part 3 of this 4 part series, you’ll learn how to capture critical APM data—such as hits, errors, and latency—for external service calls, allowing you to track external service SLOs.