GT Grafana Tempo vs PR Prometheus
Which wins: Grafana Tempo vs Prometheus? Dive into our expert analysis of features and costs to decide for your engineering team. Review user feedback...
Quick Verdict
Grafana Tempo excels at dashboards and alerting; Prometheus wins on built-in capabilities. Choose Grafana Tempo if you prioritize dashboards and alerting; choose Prometheus if you need built-in capabilities.
Grafana Tempo vs Prometheus Feature Comparison
| Feature | Grafana Tempo | Prometheus |
|---|---|---|
| Log Aggregation | Not supported No Tracing backend, not log aggregation | Not supported No |
| Full-Stack APM | Not supported No Tracing only, not full APM | Not supported No |
| Dashboards | Supported Yes Native Grafana integration for trace visualization | Not supported No |
| Alerting | Supported Yes Trace-based alerting rules | Not supported No |
| Metrics | Not supported No Object-storage only — no indexing overhead | Not supported No |
| Query Language | Supported Yes TraceQL query language | Not supported No |
| Horizontal Scaling | Supported Yes Horizontal scaling via object storage | Not supported No |
| Multi-Tenancy | Supported Yes Multi-tenant trace storage | Not supported No |
| Integrations | Supported Yes Grafana, Loki, Mimir integrations | Not supported No |
| Storage Backends | Supported Yes S3, GCS, Azure Blob, local storage | Not supported No |
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About Grafana Tempo
Disclosure: We may earn a commission if you click any of these links and make a purchase, at no additional cost to you. This does not influence our reviews.
Grafana Tempo is a distributed tracing backend that stores traces object storage only (no indexing), making it extremely cost-effective at scale. Supports OpenTracing, OpenTelemetry, and Jaeger formats. Integrates with Grafana for trace visualization and Loki for log-trace correlation. TraceQL provides a powerful query language similar to LogQL.
About Prometheus
Disclosure: We may earn a commission if you click any of these links and make a purchase, at no additional cost to you. This does not influence our reviews.
Prometheus is an open-source systems monitoring and alerting toolkit originally built at SoundCloud. It collects metrics via pull model, stores them in a time-series database, and supports PromQL for querying. Features include alerting via Alertmanager, service discovery, and federation. The standard for Kubernetes monitoring.
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