Size the cluster

Resource requirements for your Grafana Tempo cluster depend on the amount and rate of data processed, retained, and queried.

This document provides basic configuration guidelines that you can use as a starting point to help size your own deployment.

Note
Tempo is under continuous development. These requirements can change with each release.

Factors impacting cluster sizing

The size of the cluster you deploy depends on how many resources it needs for a given ingestion rate and retention: number of spans/time, average byte span size, rate of querying, and retention N days.

Tracing instrumentation also effects your Tempo cluster requirements. Refer to Best practices for suggestions on determining where to add spans, span length, and attributes.

Example sample cluster sizing

Distributor:

1 replica per every 10MB/s of received traffic
CPU: 2 cores
Mem: 2 GB

Ingester:

1 replica per every 3-5MB/s of received traffic.
CPU: 2.5 cores
Mem: 4-20GB, determined by trace composition

Querier:

1 replica per every 1-2MB/s of received traffic.
CPU: dependent on trace size and queries
Mem: 4-20GB, determined by trace composition and queries
This number of queriers should give good performance for typical search patterns and time ranges. Can scale up or down to fit the specific workload.

Query-Frontend:

2 replicas, for high availability
CPU: dependent on trace size and queries
Mem: 4-20GB, dependent on trace size and queries

Compactor:

1 replica per every 3-5 MB/s of received traffic.
CPU: 1 core (compactors are primarily I/O bound, therefore do not require much CPU)
Mem: 4-20GB, determined by trace composition