What is a key benefit of using Cloud Trace for a Node.js application?

Using Cloud Trace offers significant advantages for identifying performance bottlenecks in service interactions within a Node.js application. Cloud Trace is designed to collect latency data and provide detailed insights into how requests and processes flow through various services. By tracing each request across microservices, developers can visualize the performance characteristics of their applications.

When you implement Cloud Trace, you can analyze latency and pinpoint where delays occur in service interactions. This allows teams to focus on optimizing these particular areas, enhancing overall application performance. The detailed trace information can help identify issues such as slow database queries, inefficient service calls, or any other factors contributing to increased response times, thus enabling proactive improvement actions.

The other options, while related to different aspects of application management and monitoring, do not directly utilize the primary functionality of Cloud Trace. Monitoring application logs in real-time pertains more to logging services rather than tracing, managing database transactions relates to database management systems, and building infrastructure as code involves automation tools and practices distinct from tracing performance metrics.