Grafana Tempo is an open source distributed tracing backend from Grafana Labs that collects, stores, and queries traces, which are end-to-end records of a single request as it travels through multiple services. It’s used in microservice and cloud-native systems to troubleshoot latency, errors, and dependency issues by preserving the sequence of spans (timed operations) that make up a request. Tempo ingests trace data from common instrumentation standards, writes it efficiently to low-cost object storage, and supports searching and correlating traces with logs and metrics in Grafana so engineers can quickly jump from a symptom to the exact service and operation causing it.
With Grafana Tempo, teams can follow a request’s full path and isolate bottlenecks or failures faster; without it, investigations often rely on scattered logs and metrics, making cross-service incidents slower to diagnose and easier to misattribute. This gap exists because traces capture causal relationships between services, not just isolated measurements.