Tempo data source

Grafana ships with built-in support for Tempo, a high-volume, minimal-dependency trace storage, open source tracing solution from Grafana Labs.

To learn more about traces, refer to Introduction to tracing.

To use traces, you need you have an application or service that is instrumented to emit traces. Refer to the Instrument for tracing for more information.

Add a data source

For instructions on how to add a data source to Grafana, refer to the administration documentation. Only users with the organization administrator role can add data sources. Administrators can also configure the data source via YAML with Grafana’s provisioning system.

This video explains how to add data sources, including Loki, Tempo, and Mimir, to Grafana and Grafana Cloud. Tempo data source set up starts at 4:58 in the video.

Learn more

After you’ve added the data source, you can configure it so that your Grafana instance’s users can create queries in its query editor when they build dashboards and use Explore.

Configure the Tempo data source
Guide for configuring Tempo in Grafana
Best practices for tracing
Use best practices to plan how you implement tracing.
Use traces in Grafana
Learn about how you can use tracing data in Grafana Cloud to query data, generate metrics, and link your tracing data with logs, metrics, and profiles.
Query tracing data
Guide for using the Tempo data source's query editor
Service Graph and Service Graph view
Use the Service Graph and Service Graph view
Span filters
Use span filters to filter spans in the timeline viewer