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

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!