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

Traces emitted by your instrumented applications or services can be sent to Grafana Cloud 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.

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.

Start your learning experience with Grafana Learning Journeys

Grafana Learning Journeys provide a clear, structured path that leads you from beginner concepts to advanced use cases. Learn about this Grafana feature on Send traces to Grafana Cloud.

Start learning

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.

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

Choose your collector

Use a collector to receive spans from your applications and forward them to Grafana Cloud Traces.

Grafana Alloy (recommended):
- River-based configuration and rich Grafana Cloud integrations.
- Receivers for OTLP (gRPC/HTTP), Jaeger, and Zipkin.
- Built-in UI for status and debugging (http://localhost:12345).
- See: Set up with Grafana Alloy.
OpenTelemetry Collector:
- Broad ecosystem and vendor-neutral components.
- Flexible pipelines using processors like batch, attributes, and tail sampling.
- See: OpenTelemetry Collector.

If you are starting fresh in Grafana Cloud, prefer Grafana Alloy for the simplest setup and best integration experience. If you already operate OpenTelemetry Collector at scale, you can continue using it to send data to Grafana Cloud.

Instrument your applications

Before setting up the collector, instrument your applications so they emit spans: Learn options and links per language by reading Instrument applications.