Grafana Tempo is a new high volume distributed tracing backend whose only dependency is object storage. Unlike other tracing backends Tempo can hit massive scale without a massive and difficult to manage Elasticsearch or Cassandra cluster. The current trade off for using object storage is that Tempo supports search by trace id only. However, we will see how this trade off can be overcome using the other pillars of observability.

In this session we will use an OpenTelemetry instrumented application to demonstrate how to use logs and Prometheus exemplars to find traces effectively in Tempo. Internal Grafana metrics will also be shared as we all discuss how to scale tracing as far as possible with less operational cost and complexity than ever before.