Grafana Tempo
Grafana Tempo is a high-volume, minimal-dependency distributed tracing backend that stores and retrieves traces submitted in Jaeger, Zipkin, and OpenTelemetry formats. It keeps only trace IDs in an index and stores trace data itself in cheap object storage, trading full-text search for cost efficiency at scale.
Baseline topologies
| Topology | Minimum nodes | Roles |
|---|---|---|
| monolithic | 1 | tempo |
| microservices | 4 | tempo-distributor, tempo-ingester, tempo-querier, tempo-compactor |
What drives the cost
- Peak spans per second
- Peak trace span ingestion rate. Drives distributor and ingester CPU and memory.
- Trace retention (days)
- How long trace data is retained. Drives object storage capacity requirements.
Where it runs
bare_metal, dedicated, cloud_vm
Size Grafana Tempo and get a cost estimate