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Important: This documentation is about an older version. It's relevant only to the release noted, many of the features and functions have been updated or replaced. Please view the current version.

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Running the Tempo Backend

You can use Grafana Cloud to avoid installing, maintaining, and scaling your own instance of Grafana Tempo. Create a free account to get started, which includes free forever access to 10k metrics, 50GB logs, 50GB traces, 500VUh k6 testing & more.

These examples show various deployment and configuration options. They include trace generators so an existing application is not necessary to get started experimenting with Tempo. If you are interested in instrumentation please check out these examples.

Note: You can use Grafana Cloud to avoid installing, maintaining, and scaling your own instance of Grafana Tempo. The free forever plan includes 50GB of free traces. Create an account to get started.

Docker Compose

The docker-compose examples are simpler and designed to show minimal configuration. This is a great place to get started with Tempo and learn about various trace discovery flows.

Check the above link for all kinds of examples including:

  • Trace discovery with Loki
  • Basic Grafana Agent/OpenTelemetry Setup
  • Various Backends (S3/GCS/Azure)

Tanka

The Jsonnet based example shows a complete microservice based deployment. There are single binary and microservices examples.

Helm

The Helm example shows a complete microservice based deployment. There are single binary and microservices examples.

The New Stack (TNS) Demo

The TNS demo demonstrates a fully-instrumented three-tier application and the integration of Grafana, Prometheus, Loki, and Tempo features, including metrics to traces (exemplars), logs to traces, and traces to logs. A good place to start is the docker-compose setup which includes a pre-built dashboard, load generator, and exemplars.

Explanation:

  • Metrics To Traces (Exemplars)
    • The weaveworks middleware automatically records request latency with an exemplar. Try running the following PromQL query in Grafana Explore and enabling the exemplars switch. It shows the p50 request latency for the “app” container: histogram_quantile(0.5, sum(rate(tns_request_duration_seconds_bucket{job="tns/app"}[$__rate_interval])) by (le)). Click the exemplar to see the trace.
  • LogqlV2 and Logs to Traces
    • The http client logs inter-service http requests in logfmt format, which enables the ability to perform complex queries over api traffic. Try running the following query which shows all failed api requests from app to db and took longer than 100ms: {job="tns/app"} | logfmt | level="info" and status>=500 and status <=599 and duration > 100ms. Expand the log line and click the Tempo button near the trace ID to see the trace.
  • Traces To Logs
    • When viewing only a trace in the Explore view (i.e. not side-by-side with logs), the Logs icon will appear next to each span. Click it to view the matching logs.
  • Status
    • Exemplar support in Prometheus is still pre-release so a custom image is used, and the feature is enabled with the --enable-feature=exemplar-storage command line parameter.