Your application's performance in Google Cloud has degraded since the last release. You suspect that downstream dependencies might be causing some requests to take longer to complete. You need to inve

Error Reporting primarily focuses on aggregating and analyzing application errors and exceptions, not on detailed latency analysis of successful or slow requests across services.

Google Cloud Managed Service for Prometheus collects metrics, which can show overall service performance, but it doesn't automatically trace the path of a single request across multiple services to pinpoint where latency accumulates.

Cloud Profiler identifies resource consumption hotspots (CPU, memory, etc.) *within a single application's code*, rather than tracking request latency across multiple distributed services.

Cloud Trace is a distributed tracing system designed to track individual requests as they propagate through a microservices architecture. It provides detailed latency breakdowns for each step and service, making it ideal for identifying performance bottlenecks caused by downstream dependencies.