The tracing pipeline

1

The four stages every trace passes through, from an instrumented application to a trace you can open.

2

How an application is made to emit spans, and why most teams use OpenTelemetry.

3

How a collector receives spans and forwards them, and why trace volume needs sampling.

4

How Grafana Cloud Traces stores traces cheaply in object storage, powered by Grafana Tempo, and the managed-vs-self-managed choice.

5

Documentation for each stage of the tracing pipeline, from instrumentation to storage.

The four-stage tracing pipeline