Grafana Tempo - Distributed Tracing Backend

Grafana Tempo is an open-source, high-scale distributed tracing backend. It is:

• Cost-efficient: only requires object storage (S3, GCS, Azure) to operate
• Deeply integrated: with Grafana, Mimir, Prometheus, Loki, and Pyroscope
• Protocol-agnostic: accepts OTLP, Jaeger, Zipkin, OpenCensus, Kafka

Quick Reference Links

• TraceQL Language Reference - query syntax, operators, examples, metrics functions
• Configuration Reference - all YAML config blocks with defaults
• Architecture and Operations - components, deployment, tuning
• Metrics from Traces - span metrics, service graphs, TraceQL metrics
• API Reference - HTTP endpoints, ingestion, search, metrics queries

What is Distributed Tracing?