grafana/tempo

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

5455 stars · 747 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

Grafana Tempo is an open-source, high-scale distributed tracing backend written in Go that stores and queries traces with only object storage as a dependency. It ingests Jaeger, Zipkin, and OpenTelemetry protocols and integrates deeply with Grafana, Prometheus, and Loki for correlated observability.

Use cases

• store and query distributed traces at massive scale
• self-host a tracing backend without Elasticsearch or Cassandra
• ingest OpenTelemetry, Jaeger, and Zipkin trace data
• correlate traces with logs and metrics in Grafana
• search traces with TraceQL
• generate service metrics from span data
• debug latency bottlenecks and errors across microservices

When to choose

• you need cost-efficient trace storage backed only by object storage
• you run the Grafana observability stack and want native trace integration
• you need to trace 100% of requests at very high volume
• you want a queryless trace exploration UI via Traces Drilldown

When to avoid

• you need full-text indexing of trace attributes out of the box
• you want a lightweight single-binary local tracing tool like Jaeger all-in-one
• you require a license more permissive than AGPLv3

Facets

service · maturity stable

tracing monitoring search-engine http-server self-hosted monitoring microservices self-hosted go distributed-tracing opentelemetry jaeger zipkin traceql object-storage grafana observability spans devops linux macos docker kubernetes

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