Tracetest

What is Tracetest?

Tracetest is an open-source trace-based testing tool built on OpenTelemetry. Instead of asserting only on HTTP responses ("did I get a 200?"), Tracetest runs assertions against the entire distributed trace generated by a request — letting you verify what happened inside every service, database query, and external call that the request touched.

Key Features

Trace-Based Assertions — Write assertions against any span in the trace: "the database query took less than 50ms", "the payment service was called exactly once", "no errors were logged in the inventory service". These assertions catch backend failures that traditional E2E tests — which only see HTTP responses — completely miss.

OpenTelemetry Native — Works with any OpenTelemetry-compatible backend: Datadog, Grafana Tempo, Jaeger, Honeycomb, New Relic, AWS X-Ray. If your services emit traces, Tracetest can test them.

Trigger Flexibility — Tests can be triggered via HTTP, gRPC, GraphQL, Kafka messages, or CLI. Works with existing test frameworks: Playwright and Cypress can trigger Tracetest assertions after UI interactions.

Visual Test Builder — Web UI for building trace assertions visually by selecting spans and defining conditions, without writing YAML manually.

CI/CD Integration — Runs in GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, and any other CI system. Test failures include full trace context, making debugging CI failures significantly faster.

Why Trace-Based Testing Matters

Modern microservices applications fail in ways that HTTP-response tests don't detect: a service returns 200 but silently fails to write to the database, a background job is triggered incorrectly, a cache is bypassed causing unexpected load. Trace-based testing makes these invisible failures visible and testable.

Pricing

• Open source: free to self-host
• Tracetest Cloud: managed SaaS with team features
• Enterprise: custom

Bottom Line

For teams with OpenTelemetry-instrumented microservices, Tracetest adds a testing layer that no other tool provides. As OpenTelemetry adoption has accelerated in 2024-2026, Tracetest has become increasingly valuable for teams who want to actually verify the behavior of their distributed systems rather than just their HTTP surfaces.