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Set up 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 across all of the services in your infrastructure.

Grafana Cloud Traces exists as a pre-configured Tempo data source within each Grafana Cloud stack. If you want to configure a different Tempo data source, refer to Connect to data sources.

How to send traces

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

Tracing data is received by Alloy and sent to Grafana Cloud

You have two options for using the Grafana Cloud Traces with your tracing data:

  • Grafana helps you collect, export, and store tracing data. This method uses the built-in capabilities in Grafana Cloud Traces.
  • You configure and store the tracing data and connect Grafana to the data store to visualize tracing data.

For the first use case, instructions, refer to Set up traces with Grafana Alloy.

For the second use case, you can configure the Tempo data source within Grafana to visualize your tracing data. Refer to the Tempo data source documentation for instructions.

For general information about using Grafana Alloy for traces, refer to the Tempo documentation for Grafana Alloy.

For the full list of configuration options, refer to Alloy configuration syntax.

If you would like to use the OpenTelemetry Collector to send traces to Grafana Cloud, Send data using OpenTelemetry Protocol.

Higher reliability with new limits on attribute sizes

Grafana Cloud Traces has a safeguard to help maintain stability and prevent out-of-memory crashes when fetching traces that contain large attributes. With this change, attributes exceeding 2KB (2048 bytes) are automatically truncated before they’re stored, striking a balance between preserving valuable trace data and maintaining overall system stability.

If you’re using Grafana Tempo or Grafana Enterprise Traces 2.7 or newer, you can configure your custom limit to maintain a stable and reliable tracing environment.

Documentation

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