Export traces of Grafana to a file for easier troubleshooting
Export traces of Grafana to a file for easier troubleshooting
When you operate Grafana yourself and have to troubleshoot performance issues, distributed traces are often the quickest way to see what’s going on under the hood. Until now, collecting them meant standing up an OpenTelemetry Collector and a tracing backend just to investigate a single issue.
Now Grafana can write its own traces directly to a file. Turn on the file exporter in your configuration, reproduce the problem, and Grafana saves its traces as a local OTLP/JSON file — no collector or backend required. You, or Grafana Support, can then open that file directly in Explore with Import trace and inspect the full request flow.
Captures are bounded by file size and duration, so it’s safe to switch on temporarily, even on a busy instance.
Available in self-managed Grafana (open source and Enterprise). For setup, refer to the tracing configuration docs.
