DevOps Dictionary

Grafana Tempo is an open source distributed tracing backend from Grafana Labs that ingests, stores, and queries traces (end-to-end records of a single request as it moves through multiple services). It’s designed for microservice and cloud-native environments where trace volume grows quickly and teams need a scalable, low-operations way to retain and retrieve trace data, typically visualized in Grafana. Tempo works by accepting trace data from common instrumentation standards, persisting it efficiently in object storage, and enabling trace lookup and correlation with logs and metrics so engineers can pinpoint where latency or errors are introduced across service boundaries.

With Grafana Tempo, teams can follow a request’s full path to debug performance and reliability issues faster; without it, they often rely on fragmented logs and metrics, making cross-service incidents slower to diagnose and easier to miss. This gap exists because traces preserve the causal chain between spans, keeping the narrative of a request intact rather than scattered across unrelated signals.