---
title: "Generic forwarding | Grafana Tempo documentation"
description: "Asynchronous replication of ingested traces"
---

> For a curated documentation index, see [llms.txt](/llms.txt). For the complete documentation index, see [llms-full.txt](/llms-full.txt).

# Generic forwarding

Generic forwarding allows asynchronous replication of ingested traces. The distributor writes received spans to both Kafka and defined endpoints, if enabled. This feature works in a best-effort manner, meaning that no retries happen if an error occurs during replication.

> Warning
> 
> Generic forwarding doesn’t work retroactively. After it’s enabled, the distributor only replicates freshly ingested spans.

## Configure generic forwarding

Enabling generic forwarding requires the configuration of the `distributor` and `overrides`.

1. Define a list of forwarders in the `distributor` section. Each forwarder must specify a unique `name`, supported `backend`, and backend-specific configuration.
2. Reference these forwarders in the `overrides` section. This allows for fine-grained control over forwarding and makes it possible to enable this feature globally or on a per-tenant basis.

For a detailed view of all the configuration options for the generic forwarding feature, refer to [distributor](/docs/tempo/next/configuration/#distributor) and [overrides](/docs/tempo/next/configuration/#overrides) configuration pages.