An exemplar is a specific trace representative of measurement taken in a given time interval.
While metrics excel at giving you an aggregated view of your system, traces give you a fine grained view of a single request; exemplars are a way to link the two.
Suppose your company website is experiencing a surge in traffic volumes.
While more than eighty percent of the users are able to access the website in under two seconds, some users are experiencing a higher than normal response time resulting in bad user experience.
Use exemplars to help isolate problems within your data distribution by pinpointing query traces exhibiting high latency within a time interval.
After you localize the latency problem to a few exemplar traces, you can combine it with additional system based information or location properties to perform a root cause analysis faster, leading to quick resolutions to performance issues.
For more information on exemplar configuration and how to enable exemplars, refer to the Exemplars section in [Prometheus configuration options](https://grafana.com/docs/grafana/latest/datasources/prometheus/configure/#configuration-options).
{{<figuresrc="/media/docs/grafana/exemplars/screenshot-exemplars.png"class="docs-image--no-shadow"max-width="750px"caption="Screenshot showing the detail window of an exemplar">}}
Refer to [View exemplar data](#view-exemplar-data) for instructions on how to drill down and view exemplar trace details from metrics and logs.
To know more about exemplars, refer to the blog post [Intro to exemplars, which enable Grafana Tempo’s distributed tracing at massive scale](/blog/2021/03/31/intro-to-exemplars-which-enable-grafana-tempos-distributed-tracing-at-massive-scale/).
When support for exemplar support is enabled for a Prometheus data source, you can view exemplar data either in the Explore view or from the Loki log details.
For more information on how to drill down and analyze the trace and span details, refer to the [Analyze trace and span details](#analyze-trace-and-spans) section.
You can also view exemplar trace details from the Loki logs in Explore.
Use regular expressions within the Derived fields links for Loki to extract the `traceID` information.
Now when you expand Loki logs, you can see a `traceID` property under the **Detected fields** section.
To learn more about how to extract a part of a log message into an internal or external link, refer to [using derived fields in Loki](../../explore/logs-integration/).
For more information on how to drill down and analyze the trace and span details, refer to the [Analyze trace and span details](#analyze-trace-and-spans) section.
- The next segment shows the entire span for the specific trace as a narrow strip.
All levels of the trace from the client all the way down to database query is displayed, which provides a bird's eye view of the time distribution across all layers over which the HTTP request was processed.
1. You can click within this strip view to display a magnified view of a smaller time segment within the span. This magnified view shows up in the bottom segment of the panel.
For example, if the strip view shows that most of the latency was within the app layer, you can expand the trace down the app layer to investigate the problem further.
To expand a particular layer of span, click the left icon.
