Set up and use tracing

Along with metrics and logs, tracing is one of the three pillars of modern observability. Tracing is a way to track a single request and log that single request as it crosses through all of the services in your infrastructure.

How to send traces

To send traces to Grafana Cloud Traces, you need a running Grafana Agent instance or an OpenTelemetry Collector instance in your environment.

In the configuration section of the Grafana Agent, set the following fields:

traces:
  configs:
    - name: default
      receivers: # enable the receivers that you need
        # if your app sends traces via Jaeger
        jaeger:
          protocols:
            thrift_http:
            thrift_compact:
        # if your app uses the OpenTelemetry protocol (OTLP) to send traces
        otlp:
          protocols:
            grpc:
            http:
      remote_write:
        - endpoint: <Your Traces instance remote_write endpoint>
          basic_auth:
            username: <Your Traces instance ID>
            password: <Your Cloud Access Policy token>

For the remote_write section, your endpoint, username, and password are all located in Grafana Cloud Portal at Grafana.com.

To locate this information:

Select your organization from the Organization drop-down.
Select Details on the Tempo tile.
Locate the Grafana Data Source settings.

For a more detailed procedure, refer to the Set up Grafana Cloud Traces using Grafana Agent documentation.

For general information about using the Grafana Agent for traces, refer to the Tempo documentation for Grafana Agent. For the full list of configuration options, refer to Grafana Agent traces configuration options.

If you would like to use the OpenTelemetry Collector to send traces to Grafana Cloud, check out this blog post that explains how to do so in detail.

If you’d like to use OTEL with Kubernetes, refer to Ship Kubernetes OTEL traces using Grafana Agent.

Documentation

For additional information, refer to the Tempo documentation links below.

Metrics-generator to generate metrics from incoming tracing data.
Tempo API documentation for the different ingestion formats supported and the query API.