Grafana Tempo Tracing

Deploy and operate Grafana Tempo, a high-scale distributed tracing backend for OpenTelemetry. Configures object-storage backends, writes TraceQL queries, deploys via Helm, explains trace and span structure, and troubleshoots Tempo on Kubernetes.

This skill helps you run distributed tracing at scale with Tempo: ingesting OTLP traces, configuring S3/GCS/Azure storage, writing TraceQL to find slow spans, deploying with Helm, and linking traces to logs and metrics for full-stack observability.

When to use

Use when setting up distributed tracing, writing TraceQL, configuring Tempo storage and Helm deployments, or correlating traces with metrics and logs.

Examples

Find slow requests

Trace latency outliers

Write a TraceQL query to find traces where the total duration exceeds 2s and the database span is the dominant contributor

Tempo Helm setup

Deploy Tempo with GCS

Generate a Tempo Helm values file using a GCS backend, OTLP gRPC ingestion, and a 14-day trace retention