Generate span-based metrics to track historical trends in application performance

Datadog Distributed Tracing allows users to search and analyze live traces over a 15-minute rolling window while retaining only the necessary ones through flexible retention rules. Users can now generate metrics from any span using any tag, enabling long-term trend tracking in application performance. This feature helps build meaningful business span-based metrics by leveraging Trace Search and Analytics to query and aggregate spans across various dimensions. The generated span-based metrics are stored at full granularity for 15 months, allowing historical analysis on spans. These metrics can be correlated with other telemetry data, used to configure alerts, or treated as service level indicators (SLIs) for establishing service level objectives (SLOs). This approach helps minimize costs associated with retaining and managing large volumes of spans while ensuring accurate insights into application performance.