Documentationbreadcrumb arrow Grafana Cloudbreadcrumb arrow Instrument and send databreadcrumb arrow Traces
Grafana Cloud
Grafana Cloud Traces

Grafana Cloud Traces

Grafana Cloud Traces is an easy-to-use, and high-scale distributed tracing backend. Using Cloud Traces, you can 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.

Grafana Cloud Traces is a fully managed distributed tracing system powered by Grafana Tempo. Use its highly scalable, cost-effective trace storage and query engine to understand the flow of requests and data in your software systems and track down issues quickly.

Cloud Traces uses object storage and a columnar trace storage format based on Apache Parquet, making it extremely cost effective.

You can use open source tracing protocols, including OpenTelemetry, Zipkin, and Jaeger.

Guidance and help

Not sure where to go?
Answer a few questions and Grot will show you a helpful next step.
Loading
Loading

Explore

Learn about tracing
Learn about distributed traces and how to use them, how to instrument your app for tracing, and how to visualize tracing data in Grafana.
Set up Cloud Traces
Learn how to send tracing data to Grafana Cloud and Grafana.
Best practices
Learn about how to use best practices to help control costs related to tracing data.
Use Grafana Assistant with traces
Use Grafana Assistant to investigate your tracing data.
Query tracing data with TraceQL
TraceQL is a query language designed for selecting traces. With TraceQL, you can precisely and easily select spans and jump directly to the spans fulfilling the specified conditions.
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.