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Grafana Tempo

High-scale distributed tracing backend with minimal resource requirements.

Free and open-source (AGPL), Grafana Cloud from $8/mo

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.

  • Best for: Monitoring & Observability
  • Pricing: Free and open-source (AGPL), Grafana Cloud from $8/mo

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Features

Alerting

Threshold and anomaly-based alerting

Trace-based alerting rules

Dashboards

Visual dashboards for metrics and logs

Native Grafana integration for trace visualization

Full-Stack APM

Application performance monitoring with traces, logs, and metrics

Tracing only, not full APM

Horizontal Scaling

Scale out across nodes and regions

Horizontal scaling via object storage

Integrations

Native integrations with other tools

Grafana, Loki, Mimir integrations

Log Aggregation

Centralized log collection and search

Tracing backend, not log aggregation

Metrics

Time-series metric collection and storage

Object-storage only — no indexing overhead

Multi-Tenancy

Isolation between teams and environments

Multi-tenant trace storage

Query Language

Custom query language for data analysis

TraceQL query language

Storage Backends

Flexible storage options (S3, local, cloud)

S3, GCS, Azure Blob, local storage

Best For

Find the right DevOps tools for your specific needs. Grafana Tempo is featured in these buying guides:

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