Grafana Tempo Has a Free API — Heres How to Do Distributed Tracing at Scale

Grafana Tempo is a high-scale distributed tracing backend. Store and query traces from OpenTelemetry, Jaeger, and Zipkin — with only object storage, no Elasticsearch or Cassandra. Why Tempo? Cost-effective : Uses S3/GCS/Azure blob instead of Elasticsearch Massive scale : Handles billions of traces Multi-format : OpenTelemetry, Jaeger, Zipkin protocols Grafana native : Built-in trace visualization TraceQL : Query language for traces Metrics from traces : Auto-generate RED metrics Docker Setup services : tempo : image : grafana/tempo:latest command : [ ' -config.file=/etc/tempo.yaml' ] volumes : - ./tempo.yaml:/etc/tempo.yaml - tempo-data:/tmp/tempo ports : - ' 3200:3200' # Tempo API - ' 4317:4317' # OTLP gRPC - ' 4318:4318' # OTLP HTTP grafana : image : grafana/grafana:latest ports : - ' 3000:3000' environment : - GF_AUTH_ANONYMOUS_ENABLED=true volumes : tempo-data : Tempo Config # tempo.yaml server : http_listen_port : 3200 distributor : receivers : otlp : protocols : grpc : http : jae