---
title: "Instrument for distributed tracing | Grafana Tempo documentation"
description: "Client instrumentation is the first building block to a functioning distributed tracing visualization pipeline."
---

# 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](./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:

1. [Set up instrumentation](./set-up-instrumentation/) to generate traces
2. [Set up a collector](./set-up-collector/) to receive traces from your application