Documentation for automated readers
A curated documentation index is available at: https://grafana.com/llms.txt
A complete documentation index is available at: https://grafana.com/llms-full.txt
These indexes can help with page discovery before fetching individual documents.
This page is also available in Markdown, which may be easier for automated readers and AI tools to parse than HTML. The Markdown version is available at https://grafana.com/docs/tempo/latest/set-up-for-tracing/instrument-send.md, or by sending Accept: text/markdown to https://grafana.com/docs/tempo/latest/set-up-for-tracing/instrument-send/. For broader documentation discovery, the curated index is available at https://grafana.com/llms.txt and the complete index is available at https://grafana.com/llms-full.txt.
Instrument for distributed tracing
Client instrumentation is the first building block to a functioning distributed tracing visualization pipeline. Instrumentation handles how traces are generated. To learn more about instrumentation, refer to About instrumentation.
Instrumentation is the act of modifying the source code of a service to emit span information tied to a common trace ID. Traces themselves are a meta-object, comprised of nothing but spans that hold the same ID.
To instrument your application or service, you need to:
- Set up instrumentation to generate traces
- Set up a collector to receive traces from your application
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