Menu
This is documentation for the next version of Grafana Tempo documentation. For the latest stable release, go to the latest version.
Open source
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
Was this page helpful?
Related resources from Grafana Labs
60 min
Getting started with tracing and Grafana Tempo
In this webinar, we'll show you how to get started setting up Grafana Tempo, our open source, easy-to-use and high-volume distributed tracing backend.
60 min
Scaling your distributed tracing with Grafana Tempo
In this demo, we’ll show how Grafana Tempo allows you to scale tracing as far as possible with less operational cost and complexity than ever before.