Grafana Tempo

High-scale, cost-efficient distributed tracing backend from Grafana Labs. Tempo stores traces directly in object storage (S3, GCS, Azure Blob) with no indexing — making it dramatically cheaper than Jaeger or Zipkin for high-volume trace storage. Integrates natively with Grafana for trace visualization and supports trace-to-log and trace-to-metric correlation. Accepts OTLP, Jaeger, Zipkin, and OpenCensus trace formats. Designed as the tracing component of the Grafana LGTM stack (Loki + Grafana + Tempo + Mimir).

Evaluated Mar 06, 2026 (0d ago) v2.x
Homepage ↗ Repo ↗ Developer Tools tracing observability opentelemetry jaeger grafana open-source object-storage
⚙ Agent Friendliness
62
/ 100
Can an agent use this?
🔒 Security
79
/ 100
Is it safe for agents?
⚡ Reliability
80
/ 100
Does it work consistently?

Score Breakdown

⚙ Agent Friendliness

MCP Quality
--
Documentation
82
Error Messages
75
Auth Simplicity
85
Rate Limits
90

🔒 Security

TLS Enforcement
90
Auth Strength
72
Scope Granularity
70
Dep. Hygiene
85
Secret Handling
82

Apache 2.0, Grafana Labs. No built-in auth is a risk — mitigated by reverse proxy. OTLP traces may contain sensitive request data — ensure TLS for ingestion. Multi-tenancy via header-based org isolation. SOC2 for Grafana Cloud.

⚡ Reliability

Uptime/SLA
80
Version Stability
80
Breaking Changes
78
Error Recovery
82
AF Security Reliability

Best When

You're running Grafana for metrics/logs and want affordable high-volume trace storage using object storage, with native Grafana trace visualization and correlation.

Avoid When

You need rich trace search and analytics with complex filters — Honeycomb or Jaeger with Elasticsearch backend offer better search capabilities.

Use Cases

  • • Store distributed traces from OpenTelemetry-instrumented services at low cost using object storage with no indexing overhead
  • • Correlate traces with logs (Loki) and metrics (Mimir/Prometheus) in Grafana for unified observability without multiple backends
  • • Query traces by trace ID or span attributes via TraceQL for debugging agent distributed workflows
  • • Ingest traces from multiple sources (OTLP, Jaeger, Zipkin) into a single scalable backend
  • • Set up a complete self-hosted observability stack for agent infrastructure monitoring using the LGTM stack

Not For

  • • Teams needing search-heavy trace analytics — Tempo's design prioritizes storage cost over query flexibility; Jaeger or Honeycomb offer richer search
  • • Application Performance Monitoring (APM) with automatic instrumentation — use Elastic APM or Datadog APM for full APM capabilities
  • • Small-scale deployments where object storage overhead isn't justified — Jaeger all-in-one is simpler for dev/test

Interface

REST API
Yes
GraphQL
No
gRPC
Yes
MCP Server
No
SDK
No
Webhooks
No

Authentication

Methods: bearer_token username_password
OAuth: No Scopes: No

Tempo open source: no built-in auth — use reverse proxy. Grafana Cloud Tempo: uses Grafana Cloud auth (API keys or OAuth). Multi-tenancy via X-Scope-OrgID header for organizational isolation.

Pricing

Model: open_source
Free tier: Yes
Requires CC: No

Apache 2.0 open source. Self-hosted with S3 storage is extremely cost-efficient — storage at $0.023/GB vs $0.10-0.50/GB for managed tracing services. Grafana Cloud offers a managed option.

Agent Metadata

Pagination
cursor
Idempotent
Full
Retry Guidance
Not documented

Known Gotchas

  • ⚠ Tempo's primary query interface is by trace ID — searching by service name or time range requires TraceQL or Tempo Search API (which has resource overhead)
  • ⚠ No auth by default in self-hosted — must deploy behind auth proxy or use Grafana's built-in auth for Grafana Cloud
  • ⚠ Object storage consistency models vary — GCS/Azure may have eventual consistency for newly written traces; allow 1-5 seconds before querying recent traces
  • ⚠ Tempo requires sufficient local disk for WAL (write-ahead log) and block cache — undersized disks cause ingestion failures
  • ⚠ TraceQL is powerful but different from SQL — agents querying traces must learn Tempo's specific query syntax
  • ⚠ Tempo compactor runs periodically — fragmented blocks accumulate until compaction; configure compaction schedule for storage efficiency
  • ⚠ Multi-tenant isolation requires X-Scope-OrgID header — missing header routes to 'anonymous' tenant in multi-tenant mode

Alternatives

jaeger-api zipkin-api honeycomb-api opentelemetry-api signoz-api

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Scores are editorial opinions as of 2026-03-06.

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