Grafana Tempo is an open source distributed tracing backend from Grafana Labs that ingests, stores, and queries request traces so engineers can see how a single user or API call flows through multiple microservices. It addresses the challenge of finding where latency, errors, or retries are introduced when work fans out across many components by persisting end-to-end traces made of spans (timed operations) linked by parent-child relationships. Tempo typically accepts standard telemetry formats such as OpenTelemetry, stores trace data efficiently with low operational overhead, and integrates with Grafana so teams can jump from an incident to the exact service hop and span that caused it.
With Grafana Tempo, you can pinpoint the slow or failing step quickly and correlate trace context with metrics and logs, while without it teams often rely on fragmented signals and guesswork that increases mean time to resolution. This gap exists because traces carry causal context across service boundaries, not just isolated events.