Advantages of the Tempo data source
Grafana ships with built-in support for Grafana Tempo, a high-volume, minimal-dependency distributed tracing backend from Grafana Labs. The Tempo data source gives you native query, visualization, and correlation features without writing any custom integration code.
The Tempo data source provides the following advantages:
- TraceQL queries — Query traces precisely with TraceQL, the query language designed for tracing data
- Search — Find traces by service name, span name, duration, and attributes
- Service Graph — Visualize service dependencies and monitor request rate, error rate, and duration
- Trace to logs — Navigate from spans to related logs in Loki or another log data source
- Trace to metrics — Link spans to metrics queries in Prometheus or another metrics data source
- Trace to profiles — Link spans to profiling data in Grafana Pyroscope with embedded flame graphs
- Trace correlations — Create custom correlation links to any data source or external URL
- Streaming — Display TraceQL search and metrics results as they become available
- JSON trace upload — Upload and visualize trace files without a running Tempo instance
- Explore integration — Run ad-hoc trace investigations without building a dashboard
In the next milestone, you prepare the connection details you’ll need to add a Tempo data source.