Overview Leaderboard Methodology
Industry Report

Distributed Tracing Solutions

Tools that instrument and correlate requests across microservices to visualize request flows, latency hotspots, and service dependencies.

Brands tracked: 33
Brands analyzed: 33
Last updated: 2026-04-22
Model: OpenAI GPT-5
Prompts: 263
Total responses: 1,330
Top Brand Overall?
Datadog
89/100

Highest overall AI Visibility Score in this industry.

LBA Leader?
Datadog APM
90

Highest score on the LBA metric.

Authority Leader?
Datadog
89

Highest score on the Authority metric.

TOM Leader?
Datadog
98

Highest score on the TOM metric.

Datadog is the default answer in AI responses for Distributed Tracing Solutions

Datadog and Grafana together dominate AI responses for Distributed Tracing Solutions. Both brands consistently surface unprompted, with the model treating them as the default answers for most category queries. Brands outside the top two face a structural disadvantage: users are usually given these two before the model even considers alternatives.

Brand Leaderboard All 33 Distributed Tracing Solutions brands ranked

Ranked by overall AI Visibility Score (geometric mean of LBA, Authority, and TOM). Click any brand for the full report.

# Brand LBA Authority TOM Overall
1
Datadog
datadoghq.com
 81
89
98
89
2
Grafana
grafana.com
 83
74
87
81
3
Honeycomb
honeycomb.io
 87
64
74
74
4
New Relic
newrelic.com
 83
57
67
68
5
Jaeger
jaegertracing.io
 85
50
69
66
6
Datadog APM
datadog.com
 90
49
63
65
7
OpenTelemetry
opentelemetry.io
 79
53
63
64
8
Dynatrace
dynatrace.com
 87
35
60
57
9
Elastic
elastic.co
 84
9
29
28
10
Zipkin
zipkin.io
 77
7
24
23
11
Splunk
splunk.com
 86
1
21
13
12
SigNoz
signoz.io
 67
4
7
12
13
Apache
apache.org
 68
0
13
2
14
Google
google.com
 89
0
12
2
15
Lightstep
lightstep.com
 77
0
7
2
16
Sentry
sentry.io
 85
0
2
2
17
AppDynamics
appdynamics.com
 73
0
4
1
18
Amazon
amazon.com
 79
0
0
0
19
A
Aspecto
aspecto.io
 33
0
0
0
20
Atatus
atatus.com
 48
0
0
0
21
Coroot
coroot.com
 48
0
0
0
22
Dash0
dash0.com
 30
0
0
0
23
Glowroot
glowroot.org
 56
0
0
0
24
groundcover
groundcover.com
 56
0
0
0
25
HyperDX
hyperdx.io
 49
0
0
0
26
Instana
instana.com
 75
0
0
0
27
Logz.io
logz.io
 59
0
0
0
28
Lumigo
lumigo.io
 70
0
0
0
29
Middleware
middleware.io
 52
0
0
0
30
Pinpoint
pinpointhq.com
 35
0
0
0
31
Scout APM
scoutapm.com
 69
0
0
0
32
Tracetest
tracetest.io
 63
0
0
0
33
Uptrace
uptrace.dev
 51
0
0
0

How is this calculated? Methodology

Every brand in this leaderboard is scored against the same set of 263 shared Distributed Tracing Solutions prompts. The same prompts, same model, same iterations. So differences in scores reflect actual differences in AI visibility, not differences in measurement.

Overall AI Visibility Score
Geometric mean of LBA, Authority and TOM: (LBA × Authority × TOM)^(1/3). Geometric mean is used so that any single weak metric pulls the overall score down, rather than being masked by strength elsewhere.
Shared industry prompts
For Authority and TOM, all brands in the industry are scored against the same 263 category prompts (e.g. "best SEO tools for agencies"). This makes brand-to-brand comparisons valid - everyone faces identical inputs. LBA prompts are per-brand because they ask brand-specific questions.
Latent Brand Association (LBA)
5 brand probes + 1 control prompt, each run 5 times in recall mode (no web search). LBA = quality × meta × stability × share × recognition × 100. Read the full LBA methodology →
LLM Authority
50 organic category prompts (discovery, comparison, problem and transactional intents), each run once in recall mode and once in retrieval mode. Score = frequency × log-decayed prominence × intent weight, then 50/50 averaged across the two modes. Read the full Authority methodology →
Top of Mind (TOM)
15 high-volume discovery prompts (sourced from Keywords Everywhere search-volume data), each run 5 times in pure recall mode (no web). Score = frequency × (0.5 + 0.5 × log-prominence), volume-weighted. Read the full TOM methodology →