Grafana Tempo Has a Free API — Distributed Tracing at Scale

Grafana Tempo is a high-scale distributed tracing backend. It stores traces in object storage with no indexing cost — making it the cheapest tracing solution.

What Is Tempo?

Tempo is a distributed tracing backend by Grafana Labs. It only requires object storage (S3/GCS/MinIO) to operate — no Elasticsearch, no Cassandra.

Features:

• No indexing required
• S3/GCS/MinIO backend
• Native Grafana integration
• OpenTelemetry, Jaeger, Zipkin compatible
• TraceQL query language

Quick Start

docker run -p 3200:3200 -p 4317:4317 grafana/tempo:latest -config.file=/etc/tempo/tempo.yaml

HTTP API

# Get trace by ID
curl http://localhost:3200/api/traces/TRACE_ID

# Search traces
curl -G http://localhost:3200/api/search \
  --data-urlencode "q={resource.service.name=\"my-api\" && status=error}" \
  --data-urlencode "limit=20"

# TraceQL query
curl -G http://localhost:3200/api/search \
  --data-urlencode "q={span.http.status_code >= 500}"

Send Traces (OTLP)

# OpenTelemetry collector sends to Tempo
# Configure OTLP exporter to localhost:4317

Use Cases

1. Distributed tracing — track requests across services
2. Cost reduction — cheaper than Jaeger with Elasticsearch
3. Debugging — find slow or failing traces
4. SLA monitoring — service latency tracking
5. Grafana dashboards — trace-to-log-to-metric correlation

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