One operation inside a trace, such as a single LLM call or prompt flow node, carrying attributes plus start and end times. Nested spans reveal the order of calls.
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In the Ultra Transcenders books
Each book explains Span in context, with comparison tables and the common traps.
Terms in this definition
- LLM
Large language model, usually a transformer network with billions of parameters that learnt to predict the next token from vast amounts of text. Compared with a small language model it is more capable across tasks, but slower and costlier.
- Prompt flow
Tool in Foundry and Azure Machine Learning for assembling LLM applications as graphs of nodes (LLM, prompt and Python tools), with variants and evaluation. Microsoft Agent Framework is replacing it as it is retired.
Related terms
- Backend pool
Targets of a load balancer, identified by IP address or NIC IP configuration. A pool can't span VNets, and a Standard load balancer won't accept a VM that has a Basic public IP.
- DATESINPERIOD
For rolling-period measures: given a starting date, a count and an interval, this DAX time intelligence function returns the matching span of dates, which normally extends backwards.
- Microsoft Defender XDR
Brings Defender products such as Cloud Apps, Identity, Office 365 and Endpoint together, joining their signals into incidents that span the time before and after a breach. Includes advanced hunting and automatic disruption of attacks.
- Path filter
Limits branch policies or triggers to changes in certain folders. Azure Repos wants a leading / or wildcard and allows * to span folder separators, unlike GitHub, where fnmatch's * halts at each /.
- Period columns
In a system-versioned temporal table, two datetime2 columns (ROW START and ROW END, tied together by PERIOD FOR SYSTEM_TIME and marked GENERATED ALWAYS) holding the UTC span in which each version of a row was valid; the engine populates them itself.
- RANGE
Usable only in visual calculations, this DAX function picks a span of rows along an axis counted from the current one, say the previous six. Think of it as a simpler WINDOW, handy for moving totals.
- Range query
Second only to a point query for efficiency in Azure Table storage: it names one PartitionKey plus a span of RowKey values and returns the contiguous entities within that partition.
- Server trust group
A set of SQL Managed Instances that trust each other so distributed transactions can span them.