What it analyzes
For each service in your catalog, Telemetry Review evaluates:| Dimension | What it checks |
|---|---|
| Coverage | Are all critical endpoints instrumented? Are there gaps in trace propagation? |
| Quality | Are span names meaningful? Are error spans actually marked as errors? |
| Cardinality | Are there high-cardinality labels (e.g. user IDs in metric labels) that will blow up your costs? |
| Cost | Estimated monthly spend based on current ingestion volume for this service |
| Noise | Noisy or useless spans that should be filtered (health checks, heartbeats) |
Running a review
- Go to Telemetry Review.
- Click Run review next to a service. You can also run a review from Service detail → Telemetry tab.
- The review runs against the last 24 hours of data from your connected platform (Datadog or Grafana).
- Results appear within 30–60 seconds.
Reading the results
Each review shows a score (0–100) and a set of findings:Score bands
| Score | What it means |
|---|---|
| 80–100 | Good telemetry — minor improvements available |
| 60–79 | Room for improvement — several gaps identified |
| 40–59 | Significant issues — some areas are blind spots |
| < 40 | Poor telemetry — major instrumentation work needed |
Findings
Each finding has a severity (critical / warning / info) and a recommendation explaining what to change and why. Examples:CRITICAL: 40% of spans in checkout-service have no parent span — distributed tracing is broken for this serviceWARNING: payment-service.user_id label on metrics has >10,000 unique values — this will cause cost spikesINFO: /health endpoint is being traced — consider adding it to the drop filter
Telemetry Standards
Go to Telemetry Review → Standards to define what “good” means for your organization:- Required span attributes (e.g. every span must have
service.version) - Required metric labels
- Maximum allowed cardinality per label
- Minimum coverage thresholds per service tier