# grafana/tempo

Grafana Tempo is a high volume, minimal dependency distributed tracing backend.

Repository: https://github.com/grafana/tempo
Canonical: https://ross.abutalabs.com/products/tempo
Homepage: https://grafana.com/oss/tempo/
Language: Go
License: AGPL-3.0
License Family: copyleft
Topics: distributed-tracing, grafana
Last push: 2026-08-26T23:18:49+00:00

## Health v2 (maintenance only)
Score: 98/100 (v2, computed 2026-09-03T02:20:16.233290+00:00)
- activity 99, release rhythm 97, longevity 100
- inputs: {"age_days": 2413, "days_push": 7, "days_rel": 20, "gap_med": 20.5, "n_releases_24m": 27}
- flags: none
- formula: round(0.45*activity + 0.35*rhythm + 0.20*longevity); archived -> min(score, 10)

## Adoption (not part of the score)
Stars 5455, forks 747 (observed 2026-08-28T04:09:19.142878+00:00)

## What it is
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
- artifact type: service
- maturity: stable
- function: tracing, monitoring, search-engine, http-server, self-hosted
- domain: monitoring, microservices
- platform: self-hosted, go
- tags: distributed-tracing, opentelemetry, jaeger, zipkin, traceql, object-storage, grafana, observability, spans, devops, linux, macos, docker, kubernetes

## Member repositories
- grafana/tempo (main) score 98

## Provenance
- Observed fields: from GitHub, fetched 2026-08-28T04:09:19.142878+00:00.
- Health v2: computed from the inputs above; adoption is never an input.
- Inferred fields (summary, facets, guidance): AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, on 2026-08-29T17:56:48.336137+00:00, confidence not recorded.
  - readme: https://github.com/grafana/tempo (fetched 2026-08-28T04:09:19.142878+00:00, sha 97fa025c7ac6)
  - homepage: https://grafana.com/oss/tempo/ (fetched 2026-08-29T08:52:01.024734+00:00, sha a0284bc9113f)
  - site_page: https://grafana.com/docs (fetched 2026-08-29T08:52:01.036555+00:00, sha 882a3fe34bf0)
  - site_page: https://grafana.com/docs/tempo/latest?pg=oss-tempo&plcmt=quick-links (fetched 2026-08-29T08:52:01.038512+00:00, sha 3c06ea35f44f)
  - site_page: https://grafana.com/go/webinar/getting-started-with-tracing-and-grafana-tempo?pg=oss-tempo&plcmt=quick-links (fetched 2026-08-29T08:52:01.040069+00:00, sha 9c8d4152663d)
  - site_page: https://grafana.com/docs/tempo/latest/getting-started?pg=oss-tempo&plcmt=resources (fetched 2026-08-29T08:52:01.041583+00:00, sha acc62cb71c7f)
  - site_page: https://grafana.com/docs/tempo/latest?pg=oss-tempo&plcmt=resources (fetched 2026-08-29T08:52:01.043090+00:00, sha 6c5ec490a3ad)
  - site_page: https://grafana.com/pricing (fetched 2026-08-29T08:52:01.033828+00:00, sha 6097ce127c08)
- Data as of 2026-08-30T08:39:29.467469+00:00.