> For the complete documentation index, see [llms.txt](https://docs.ionos.com/cloud/llms.txt). Markdown versions of documentation pages are available by appending `.md` to page URLs; this page is available as [Markdown](https://docs.ionos.com/cloud/observability/tracing-service/overview/trace-types.md).

# Trace Types

To understand what Tracing Service can show, start with the kinds of operations that distributed tracing typically captures.

* **Server spans:** These represent inbound requests handled by a service, such as an HTTP API receiving a client request.
* **Client spans:** These represent outbound calls from a service to another service, such as HTTP requests or RPC calls to downstream dependencies.
* **Internal spans:** These capture in-process work inside a service, such as validation, business logic, or background processing steps.
* **Producer spans:** These represent operations that publish messages, events, or jobs to asynchronous systems such as queues, topics, or streams.
* **Consumer spans:** These represent operations that receive and process messages from asynchronous systems.
* **Error traces:** Traces can include span status, events, and attributes that indicate failures, retries, or degraded operations.
* **Cross-service traces:** The most valuable tracing workflows combine many span types into one distributed trace, allowing you to follow a request across APIs, services, databases, and asynchronous components.


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