Grafana Tempo is a distributed tracing backend built for massive scale and low operational overhead. Unlike traditional tracing systems that depend on complex databases, Tempo uses object storage—such as S3, GCS, or Azure Blob Storage—to store trace data, making it highly cost-effective and resilient. Tempo is part of the Grafana observability stack and integrates natively with Grafana, Prometheus, and Loki, enabling unified visualization and correlation across metrics, logs, and traces.

Technically, Tempo supports ingestion from major tracing protocols including Jaeger, Zipkin, OpenCensus, and OpenTelemetry, ensuring easy interoperability. It features TraceQL, a domain-specific query language for traces inspired by PromQL and LogQL, allowing developers to perform targeted searches and complex trace-based analytics. The newer TraceQL Metrics capability even lets users derive metrics directly from trace data, bridging the gap between tracing and performance analysis.

Tempo’s Traces Drilldown UI further enhances usability by providing intuitive, queryless analysis of latency, errors, and performance bottlenecks. Combined with the tempo-cli and tempo-vulture tools, it delivers a full suite for trace collection, verification, and debugging.

Built in Go and following OpenTelemetry standards, Grafana Tempo is ideal for organizations seeking scalable, vendor-neutral distributed tracing to power observability at cloud scale.