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Welcome to the Grafana learning path that shows you how to connect Grafana Cloud to a Tempo tracing backend and query your distributed traces.

Estimated time: 16 min

Connect to a Tempo data source in Grafana Cloud

Welcome to the Grafana learning path that shows you how to connect Grafana Cloud to a Tempo tracing backend and query your distributed traces.

Tempo is Grafana Labs’ high-volume, minimal-dependency distributed tracing backend. The Tempo data source lets you search traces with TraceQL, visualize service dependencies with the Service Graph, correlate traces with logs, metrics, and profiles, and explore tracing data in Grafana dashboards and Explore.

This path teaches you how to add a Tempo data source in Grafana Cloud, configure the connection URL and authentication, test the connection, and verify that traces flow through to Explore.

Here’s what to expect

When you complete this path, you’ll be able to:

  • Understand the value of distributed tracing for observability
  • Learn the advantages of using the Tempo data source in Grafana Cloud
  • Gather the connection URL, credentials, and tenant ID for your Tempo backend
  • Add and name a new Tempo data source in Grafana Cloud
  • Configure the connection URL for your Tempo environment
  • Select an authentication method and enter credentials
  • Save and test the connection to confirm Grafana can reach Tempo
  • Verify trace data with a TraceQL query in Explore

Before you begin

Before you connect to a Tempo data source, ensure you have:

  • A Grafana Cloud account. To create an account, refer to Grafana Cloud.
  • Administrator rights to your Grafana instance.
  • A Tempo backend to connect to. This can be a self-managed Tempo instance, a Grafana Enterprise Traces (GET) cluster, or a Grafana Cloud Traces stack.
  • Network access between Grafana Cloud and your Tempo backend. For self-managed Tempo reachable only on a private network, you need a private data source connection (PDC).
  • An application or service emitting traces to Tempo. Refer to Set up tracing for Grafana Cloud, or Instrument for tracing for self-managed Tempo.

Note: Grafana Cloud includes a pre-configured grafanacloud-<stack>-traces data source backed by Tempo. Add a Tempo data source manually when you need to connect to a self-managed Tempo instance, a Grafana Enterprise Traces cluster, or require a custom configuration beyond the pre-configured data source.

Troubleshooting

If you get stuck, we’ve got your back! Where appropriate, troubleshooting information is just a click away.

More to explore

We understand you might want to explore other capabilities not strictly on this path. We’ll provide you opportunities where it makes sense.

Are you ready?
Let's go!