---
title: "Tempo data source | Grafana documentation"
description: "Guide for using Tempo in Grafana"
---

> For a curated documentation index, see [llms.txt](/llms.txt). For the complete documentation index, see [llms-full.txt](/llms-full.txt).

# Tempo data source

Grafana ships with built-in support for [Tempo](/docs/tempo/latest/), a high-volume, minimal-dependency trace storage, open source tracing solution from Grafana Labs.

To learn more about traces, refer to [Introduction to tracing](/docs/tempo/latest/introduction/).

To use traces, you need you have an application or service that is instrumented to emit traces. Refer to the [Instrument for tracing](/docs/tempo/latest/getting-started/instrumentation/) for more information.

## Add a data source

For instructions on how to add a data source to Grafana, refer to the [administration documentation](/docs/grafana/v12.4/administration/data-source-management/). Only users with the organization administrator role can add data sources. Administrators can also [configure the data source via YAML](/docs/grafana/v12.4/datasources/tempo/configure-tempo-data-source/#provision-the-data-source) 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](/docs/grafana/v12.4/datasources/tempo/configure-tempo-data-source/) so that your Grafana instance’s users can create queries in its [query editor](/docs/grafana/v12.4/datasources/tempo/query-editor/) when they [build dashboards](/docs/grafana/v12.4/dashboards/build-dashboards/) and use [Explore](/docs/grafana/v12.4/explore/).

- [Configure the Tempo data source](/docs/grafana/v12.4/datasources/tempo/configure-tempo-data-source/)  
  Guide for configuring Tempo in Grafana
- [Best practices for tracing](/docs/grafana/v12.4/datasources/tempo/tracing-best-practices/)  
  Use best practices to plan how you implement tracing.
- [Use traces in Grafana](/docs/grafana/v12.4/datasources/tempo/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](/docs/grafana/v12.4/datasources/tempo/query-editor/)  
  Guide for using the Tempo data source's query editor
- [Service Graph and Service Graph view](/docs/grafana/v12.4/datasources/tempo/service-graph/)  
  Use the Service Graph and Service Graph view
- [Span filters](/docs/grafana/v12.4/datasources/tempo/span-filters/)  
  Use span filters to filter spans in the timeline viewer