At Groundcover, a company that provides distributed tracing and monitoring tools, they strongly believe in "dogfooding" their product to debug issues in their own system. This involves feeling the pain points of their users firsthand, which helps them identify areas for improvement. The company's current toolkit includes flame charts, service maps, and tables, but they wanted to enhance it with a clear and intuitive waterfall view that shows the timeline and duration of traces flowing through the system. This visualization is crucial for helping developers quickly identify the root cause of issues in distributed systems, such as tracking down system crashes, performance bottlenecks, or debugging headers that dropped across services. The waterfall view transforms complex trace data into an intuitive, chronological story, revealing the complete journey of a request and its spans, which are individual operations that make up the request's journey. This visualization is particularly helpful for error detection, identifying performance bottlenecks, understanding dependency relationships, and other use cases where quick insights are essential. By providing a clear and actionable view of distributed traces, the waterfall visualization can help developers solve problems faster and more efficiently.