fix(docs): point tracing install guides at the real viewer URL

[christiaan-ph]

Changes

Anyone following a distributed tracing install guide hits a 404 when they click the button that should show them their traces. The guides link to https://app.posthog.com/traces, which is not a route, so the app renders its "Page not found" scene. The viewer is at /tracing.

• The "View your traces in PostHog" button now resolves for all 8 language guides.
• Each guide showed the broken button twice: once in its own "Test your setup" step, once in the shared _snippets/tracing-next-steps.mdx block it imports. This fixes both.
• contents/blog/traces-beta.mdx already used /tracing, so the correct URL was in the repo and the install guides drifted from it.

The change is 9 identical one-line URL edits and nothing else.

The duplicate button is left alone. Collapsing the inline copies onto the snippet is the right cleanup, but it restructures the steps on 8 pages and would conflict with #19837, which already edits nodejs.mdx and nextjs.mdx.

Nothing looks different apart from where the button goes, so there are no screenshots.

The metrics install guides link to https://app.posthog.com/metrics, which is a real route. Those are untouched.

Verification

• app.posthog.com/traces returns the 404 scene, confirmed in the app against a live project.
• The repo has no remaining app.posthog.com/traces, and no us.posthog.com/traces or eu.posthog.com/traces variants.
• Not checked: the Vercel preview build.

Checklist

• I've read the docs and/or content style guides.
• Words are spelled using American English
• Use relative URLs for internal links
• I've checked the pages added or changed in the Vercel preview build
• If I moved a page, I added a redirect in vercel.json

The relative-URL box stays unchecked on purpose. These links point at the PostHog app, not at a posthog.com page, so they have to stay absolute. No page moved, so no redirect is needed.

🤖 Agent context

Autonomy: Claude Code wrote this change; a human directed it and reviews it.

Found while investigating a support ticket. A customer sent OpenTelemetry logs, metrics and traces, got HTTP 200 for all three, and reported they could not find any trace UI. Their traces had ingested correctly the whole time. They clicked this button, landed on the 404, and concluded the product did not support their data.

Skills invoked: /writing-pr-descriptions.

Verified before the edit: /tracing is the registered route in frontend/src/products.tsx, and no /traces route or redirect exists in the app.

[github-actions]

Deploy preview

Status	Details	Updated (UTC)
🟢 Ready	View preview	Sep 04, 2026 11:18AM

[github-actions]

Vale prose linter → found 3 errors, 4 warnings, 0 suggestions in your markdown

Full report → Copy the linter results into an LLM to batch-fix issues.

Linter being weird? Update the rules!

contents/docs/distributed-tracing/installation/dotnet.mdx — 0 errors, 1 warnings, 0 suggestions

Line	Severity	Message	Rule
3:15	warning	'dotnet' is a possible misspelling.	PostHogBase.Spelling

contents/docs/distributed-tracing/installation/nextjs.mdx — 3 errors, 1 warnings, 0 suggestions

Line	Severity	Message	Rule
36:52	error	Hi, Andy here... use an en dash ( – ) with spaces. On Mac, holding down the Option and hyphen key will give you an en dash.	PostHogBase.EnDash
36:57	warning	Use 'X' instead of 'x'.	Vale.Terms
36:193	error	Hi, Andy here... use an en dash ( – ) with spaces. On Mac, holding down the Option and hyphen key will give you an en dash.	PostHogBase.EnDash
140:135	error	Hi, Andy here... use an en dash ( – ) with spaces. On Mac, holding down the Option and hyphen key will give you an en dash.	PostHogBase.EnDash

contents/docs/distributed-tracing/installation/nodejs.mdx — 0 errors, 1 warnings, 0 suggestions

Line	Severity	Message	Rule
3:15	warning	'nodejs' is a possible misspelling.	PostHogBase.Spelling

contents/docs/distributed-tracing/installation/php.mdx — 0 errors, 1 warnings, 0 suggestions

Line	Severity	Message	Rule
3:15	warning	Use 'PHP' instead of 'php'.	Vale.Terms

[github-actions]

Bundle report

Total JS (gzip)

8.16 MiB (+0.0 KiB / +0.0%)

Eager graph (modules shipped in each entrypoint's initial chunks)

Entrypoint	Eager size	Budget	Modules
✅ app	18.41 MiB (+0.0 KiB / +0.0%)	report-only	2052

Largest modules in the app closure

Module	Size
./src/data/mcp-tools.json	1080.2 KiB
css ./node_modules/.pnpm/css-loader@5.2.7_webpack@5.101.3/node_modules/css-loader/dist/cjs.js??ruleSet[1].rules[8].oneOf[1].use[1]!./node_modules/.pnpm/postcss-loader@4.3.0_postcss@8.5.6_webpack@5.101.3/node_modules/postcss-loader/dist/cjs.js??ruleSet[1].rules[8].oneOf[1].use[2]!./src/styles/global.css	758.8 KiB
./src/components/Stickers/Stickers.tsx	696.4 KiB
./node_modules/.pnpm/@radix-ui+react-icons@1.3.2_react@18.3.1/node_modules/@radix-ui/react-icons/dist/react-icons.esm.js	481.4 KiB
./node_modules/.pnpm/@posthog+brand@0.8.0_react@18.3.1/node_modules/@posthog/brand/dist/generated/hoggies/svg/x-ray.mjs	480.8 KiB
./node_modules/.pnpm/rehype-raw@7.0.0/node_modules/rehype-raw/lib/index.js + 29 modules	395.1 KiB
./node_modules/.pnpm/@posthog+brand@0.8.0_react@18.3.1/node_modules/@posthog/brand/dist/generated/hoggies/svg/im-the-driver.mjs	385.7 KiB
./src/hooks/useCustomers.tsx + 55 modules	370.0 KiB
./node_modules/.pnpm/@posthog+icons@0.36.6_react-dom@18.3.1_react@18.3.1__react@18.3.1/node_modules/@posthog/icons/dist/posthog-icons.es.js	354.8 KiB
./node_modules/.pnpm/react-markdown@8.0.7_@types+react@16.14.66_react@18.3.1/node_modules/react-markdown/lib/react-markdown.js + 88 modules	351.4 KiB
./src/components/ProductComparisonTable/index.tsx + 126 modules	301.8 KiB
./node_modules/.pnpm/cloudinary-core@2.14.0_lodash@4.17.21/node_modules/cloudinary-core/cloudinary-core.js	281.9 KiB
./node_modules/.pnpm/@posthog+brand@0.8.0_react@18.3.1/node_modules/@posthog/brand/dist/generated/hoggies/svg/doll-house.mjs	281.7 KiB
./node_modules/.pnpm/@posthog+brand@0.8.0_react@18.3.1/node_modules/@posthog/brand/dist/generated/hoggies/svg/director.mjs	275.6 KiB
./src/components/SearchUI/index.tsx + 87 modules	273.0 KiB

---

Eager-graph budgets are report-only until a baseline is established. Sizes are gzip of public/**/*.js; eager size is webpack module source bytes for the modules actually shipped in the entrypoint's initial chunks (post-tree-shake).

[DanielVisca]

🤟🏽 Thanks for catching this!