Set up Tempo

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 14:59:14 +0000

Set up Tempo

To set up Tempo, you need to:

Plan your deployment
Deploy Tempo
Test your installation
(Optional) Configure Tempo services

Plan your deployment

How you choose to deploy Tempo depends upon your tracing needs. Tempo has two deployment modes: monolithic or microservices.

Refer to Plan your deployment to determine the best method to deploy Tempo.

Deploy Tempo

Once you have decided the best method, you can deploy and set up Tempo.

Grafana Tempo is available as a pre-compiled binary, OS-specific packaging, and Docker image.

Refer to Deploy Tempo for instructions for deploying using Kubernetes and deploying locally.

Test your installation

Once Tempo is deployed, you can validate Tempo by visualizing traces data:

Using a test application for a Tempo cluster for the Kubernetes with Tanka setup
Using a Docker example to test the Linux setup

These visualizations test Kubernetes with Tanka and Linux procedures. They don’t check optional configuration you have enabled.

(Optional) Configure Tempo services

Explore features by learning about available features and configurations.

If you would like to see a simplified, annotated example configuration for Tempo, the Introduction To MLT example repository contains a configuration for a monolithic instance.

Instrument for distributed tracing

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 14:59:14 +0000

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

Set up for tracing on Grafana Labs

Set up Tempo

Set up Tempo

Plan your deployment

Deploy Tempo

Test your installation

(Optional) Configure Tempo services

Instrument for distributed tracing

Instrument for distributed tracing