Version 1.2 release notes

The Tempo team is excited to announce the release of Tempo 1.2. This release introduces Tempo search.

Features and enhancements

Recent traces search The headline feature of Tempo 1.2 is the ability to search for data that is still in the ingester component. This experimental feature must be enabled using feature flags in both Grafana and Tempo. Refer to Tempo search for details.
Scalable monolithic deployment mode (formerly scalable single binary deployment mode) The new scalable monolithic deployment mode is operationally simpler, although less robust than a fully distributed deployment. We consider it a balanced operational mode that some may find attractive.
Massive performance improvements were achieved by more efficiently batching trace data being ingested. In terms of CPU needed, Tempo v1.2 is twice as efficient as Tempo v1.1. Refer to PR 1075 for details.
API improvements Some informational endpoints were consolidated within the status endpoint. New endpoints were also added.

When upgrading to Tempo v1.2, be aware of these changes:

Support for v0 and v1 blocks were dropped as announced with Tempo v1.1. Refer to the Tempo v1.1 changelog for details.
PR 1007 altered the Querier API. When upgrading components within a deployment, there will be a read outage until all queriers and query frontends have rolled to the upgraded version.
API improvements consolidated informational endpoints within the status endpoint.
Metric ingester_bytes_metric_total is renamed ingester_bytes_received_total by PR 979.
Metric cortex_runtime_config_last_reload_successful is renamed tempo_runtime_config_last_reload_successful by PR 945.
The tempo-cli flag --storage.trace.maintenance-cycle is renamed -storage.trace.blocklist_poll by PR 897.

Honor the default values of configuration parameters max_bytes_per_trace and max_search_bytes_per_trace. PR #1109 (@BitProcessor)
Reclassify the writing of empty traces to be a warning instead of an error. PR #1113 (@mdisibio)

Fixed errors with magic numbers and other block mishandling when an ingester forcefully shuts down. Issue #937 (@mdisibio)
Fixed a memory leak in the compactor component. PR #806 (@mdisibio)
Set a span’s tag span.kind to client in query-frontend to allow query frontend spans to be paired with querier server spans. PR #975 (@mapno)
Metric tempodb_backend_hedged_roundtrips_total now correctly counts hedged roundtrips. PR #1079 (@joe-elliott)
Updated the go-kit logger package to remove spurious debug logs. PR #1094 (@bboreham)