Tracing Technicalities with Grafana Tempo

Grafana Tempo is the third telemetry storage tool from Grafana that we’ll discuss; it provides the capability to store and query trace data. This chapter will introduce the Tempo query language (TraceQL). TraceQL can be used to select and filter traces generated by your applications to gather insights from across traces; the language is very similar to LogQL and PromQL but tailored to trace data. In this chapter, we will explore the major tracing protocols and how they can be used to output traces from applications; this will help you make informed choices on which protocol to use in an application, or which protocols to support when collecting data. We’ll then explore the architecture of Tempo to understand how it can fulfill the need for a scalable platform for tracing.

We will cover the following main topics in this chapter:

• Introducing Tempo and the TraceQL query language
• Exploring tracing protocols
• Understanding...