Cloud Trace, formerly known as Stackdriver Trace, is a distributed tracing system designed to collect latency data from your applications and present it within the Google Cloud Console. It enables you to monitor how requests navigate through your application, offering detailed, near real-time performance insights. Cloud Trace automatically analyzes all application traces to produce comprehensive latency reports, highlighting performance degradation. It is capable of capturing traces from all your virtual machines (VMs), containers, or App Engine projects.