Compression/Encoding

Tempo has the ability to compress traces that it pushes into the backend. This requires a bit extra memory and cpu but seriously reduces the amount of stored data. Anecdotal tests suggest that zstd will cut your storage costs to ~15% of the uncompressed amount. It is highly recommended to use the default zstd.

Compression is configured under storage like so:

storage:
  trace:
    block:
      encoding: zstd

The following options are supported:

• none
• gzip
• lz4-64k
• lz4-256k
• lz4-1M
• lz4
• snappy
• zstd
• s2

It is important to note that although all of these compression formats are supported in Tempo, at Grafana we use zstd and it’s possible/probable that the other compression algorithms may have issue at scale. Please file an issue if you stumble upon any problems!

WAL

The WAL also supports compression. By default this is configured to use snappy. This comes with a small performance penalty but reduces disk I/O and and adds checksums to the WAL. All of the above configuration options are supported but only snappy has been tested at scale.

storage:
  trace:
    wal:
      encoding: snappy