Menu
Documentation
Grafana Tempo
Open source
![Grafana Tempo](/static/assets/img/blog/tempo.png)
Grafana Tempo
Grafana Tempo is an open-source, easy-to-use, and high-scale distributed tracing backend. Tempo lets you search for traces, generate metrics from spans, and link your tracing data with logs and metrics.
Overview
Distributed tracing visualizes the lifecycle of a request as it passes through a set of applications.
Tempo is cost-efficient, and only requires an object storage to operate. Tempo is deeply integrated with Grafana, Mimir, Prometheus, and Loki. You can use Tempo with open source tracing protocols, including Jaeger, Zipkin, or OpenTelemetry.
Tempo integrates well with a number of existing open source tools:
- Grafana ships with native support using the built-in Tempo data source.
- Grafana Loki, with its powerful query language LogQL v2 lets you filter requests that you care about, and jump to traces using the Derived fields support in Grafana.
- Prometheus exemplars let you jump from Prometheus metrics to Tempo traces by clicking on recorded exemplars.
Explore
Learn about tracing
What is distributed tracing? Learn about traces and how you can use them, how you can instrument your app for tracing, and how you can visualize tracing data in Grafana.
Set up Tempo
Plan your deployment to meet your needs, deploy Tempo, test your installation, and configure Tempo services.
Manage Tempo
Learn about Tempo architecture, best practices, Parquet backend, dedicated attribute columns, metrics from traces, and more.
Metrics and tracing
Use metrics-generator to derive metrics from ingested traces. The metrics-generator processes spans and writes metrics to a Prometheus data source using the Prometheus remote write protocol.
Query with TraceQL
Inspired by PromQL and LogQL, TraceQL is a query language designed for selecting traces in Tempo. This query language lets you precisely and easily select spans and jump directly to the spans fulfilling the specified conditions.
Was this page helpful?
Related documentation
Related resources from Grafana Labs
Additional helpful documentation, links, and articles:
![Getting started with tracing and Grafana Tempo](/static/assets/featured/getting-started-with-grafana-temp_featured.png?w=200 200w, /static/assets/featured/getting-started-with-grafana-temp_featured.png?w=400 400w)
Getting started with tracing and Grafana Tempo
In this webinar, we'll show you how to get started setting up Grafana Tempo, our open source, easy-to-use and high-volume distributed tracing backend.
![Scaling your distributed tracing with Grafana Tempo](/static/assets/featured/scaling-your-traces-with-grafana-tempo_featured.png?w=200 200w, /static/assets/featured/scaling-your-traces-with-grafana-tempo_featured.png?w=400 400w)
Scaling your distributed tracing with Grafana Tempo
In this demo, we’ll show how Grafana Tempo allows you to scale tracing as far as possible with less operational cost and complexity than ever before.
![How Grafana and Tempo 2.0 make it easier to explore distributed traces](/media/events/grafanacon/2023/meta-no-dates/GrafanaCON-2023-Session-Tempo-distributed-traces.png?w=200 200w, /media/events/grafanacon/2023/meta-no-dates/GrafanaCON-2023-Session-Tempo-distributed-traces.png?w=400 400w)
How Grafana and Tempo 2.0 make it easier to explore distributed traces
Learn best practices for operating Grafana Tempo and tips and tricks to find and visualize "needle in the haystack" traces with TraceQL.