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Documentation Grafana Tempo Set up for tracing Set up Tempo Plan your deployment Deployment modes

Deployment modes

Tempo supports two deployment modes: monolithic and microservices. All components are compiled into a single binary, and the -target flag determines which mode runs.

Monolithic mode

In monolithic mode, the required components run in a single process using -target=all, which is the default. No Kafka is required. The distributor pushes trace data in-process directly to the live-store and metrics-generator, and traces are flushed to the configured storage backend. Object storage is recommended for production deployments.

Use monolithic mode when:

• You are getting started with Tempo or evaluating it
• You need a development or testing environment
• Your trace volume is under 25-35 MB/s or 55k-80k spans/s
• Operational simplicity matters more than independent scaling

Monolithic mode has some trade-offs to be aware of. All components share the same resource pool, so a spike in query load can affect write throughput and vice versa. There is no independent scaling: you can scale vertically or run multiple identical instances, but you cannot scale individual components separately. At higher volumes, memory pressure from collocated components can cause issues.

Microservices mode

In microservices mode, each component runs as a separate process with its own -target flag. For example, -target=distributor or -target=querier. This mode requires a Kafka-compatible system, such as Apache Kafka, Redpanda, or WarpStream, as the durable queue between the distributor and downstream consumers.

Use microservices mode when:

• You are running a production deployment
• You have high trace volumes that require independent scaling
• You need high availability and isolated failure domains
• You want to scale write throughput, query performance, and recent-data capacity independently

Microservices mode provides independent scaling for each component and isolated failure domains. A querier crash doesn’t affect ingestion, and a block-builder restart doesn’t affect query availability. Live-stores can be deployed across availability zones for high availability.

Choosing a mode

Next steps

• For detailed architecture, component descriptions, scaling guidelines, and migration guidance, refer to the Deployment modes reference.
• To size your cluster, refer to Size the cluster.
• To deploy Tempo, refer to Deploy your Tempo instance.