DevOps Dictionary

Grafana Tempo started as Grafana Labs’ answer to the growing flood of traces from microservices, where teams needed a cheaper, simpler way to store and search them at scale. It is an open source backend that collects and stores distributed traces and lets you follow a single request as it moves through services, queues, and databases, usually viewed inside Grafana. With Tempo, teams can see end-to-end where a request slows down or breaks, while without it they must piece together logs and metrics from many places, which takes more time and makes cross-service issues harder to spot. This gap exists because traces in Tempo keep the full request path linked together, instead of leaving the data spread across unconnected log lines and metric points.