What You Can Do¶

OpenTrace enables your AI assistant to answer questions about your system architecture. Here's what you can ask.

Discover Your System¶

Find and learn about components in your architecture.

You want to...	Ask something like...
List all services	"What services exist in my system?"
Find a specific component	"Find the payment service"
Search by description	"Which services handle user authentication?"
Get component details	"Tell me about the order-processor service"

Learn what your services depend on and what depends on them.

You want to...	Ask something like...
See what a service needs	"What does the checkout service depend on?"
Find consumers of a service	"What services call the notification API?"
Get full dependency picture	"Show me all dependencies for the user service"
Understand a component's role	"How critical is the cache service?"

Understand the blast radius of changes or failures.

You want to...	Ask something like...
Assess change impact	"What would be affected if I change the auth service?"
Plan for outages	"If the database goes down, what stops working?"
Evaluate risk	"How many services depend on the message queue?"
Find critical paths	"What are the most critical services in my system?"

Understand how components connect through your system.

You want to...	Ask something like...
Find connection paths	"How does the mobile app connect to the database?"
Trace request flow	"Show me the path from API gateway to order fulfillment"
Understand data flow	"How does data get from user signup to the analytics service?"

Discover related or duplicate functionality.

You want to...	Ask something like...
Find similar services	"What services are similar to the email-sender?"
Identify duplicates	"Are there other services that do what payment-processor does?"
Group by function	"What services handle notifications?"

Get help during incidents and debugging.

You want to...	Ask something like...
Start an investigation	"Help me investigate why orders are failing"
Trace errors	"How might an error in auth-service affect checkout?"
Find root causes	"The payment page is slow - what services are involved?"
Review past investigations	"Show me recent investigations"

Be specific about what you're looking for:

"What does order-service depend on?" works better than "Tell me about dependencies"

Name services as they appear in your system:

Use "user-auth-service" if that's the actual name, not just "auth"

Ask follow-up questions:

Start with "What services exist?" then drill into "Tell me more about the payment service"