Grafana Tempo Has a Free Distributed Tracing Backend You Should Know About

Distributed tracing is essential for microservices debugging. But Jaeger needs Elasticsearch, and commercial solutions cost thousands per month. Grafana Tempo is different: it stores traces in object storage (S3, GCS, MinIO) with no indexing database required. The result? 10-100x cheaper than alternatives. Why Tempo Is Different No Index Required Traditional tracing backends (Jaeger, Zipkin) store traces in Elasticsearch or Cassandra. Tempo stores them directly in object storage and finds them via trace ID lookup or integration with Loki/Prometheus. Traditional: Trace → Index (Elasticsearch) → Query Tempo: Trace → Object Storage → Lookup by ID → Search via metrics/logs correlation Cost Comparison Jaeger + ES Tempo + S3 Storage cost (1TB) $200-500/mo $23/mo Index overhead 2-3x data size None Operational burden High Low Setup in 5 Minutes # docker-compose.yml services : tempo : image : grafana/tempo:latest command : [ " -config.file=/etc/tempo.yaml" ] volumes : - ./tempo.yaml:/etc/tempo.