Grafana Tempo

Grafana Tempo is a high-scale distributed tracing backend that supports open standards like OpenTelemetry. Designed to be cost-efficient, it relies on object storage for long-term trace retention and enables trace search, span-based metric generation and correlation with logs and metrics. By default, Tempo uses a columnar block format based on Apache Parquet, enhancing query performance and enabling downstream tools to access trace data. Queries are executed via TraceQL and the Tempo CLI. Grafana Alloy too can be configured to collect and forward traces to Tempo. Our teams self-hosted Tempo in GKE, using MinIO for object storage, OpenTelemetry collectors and Grafana for trace visualization.