Agent Wranglers

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Use Grafana Tempo to store traces

Send OpenTelemetry traces to Grafana Tempo, keep them in object storage and read them in the Grafana you use for dashboards.

By Agent Wranglers. Updated .

How to do it

Tempo 1.0 came out on 8 June 2021, under AGPL-3.0. Version 3.0 shipped on 28 May 2026, and 2.10.10 on 21 October 2026. Stay on 2.10 until 28 November 2026, as Pick what AI tools already know says. The grafana/tempo image had about 112 million pulls on Docker Hub in October 2026. Tempo reads OTLP from the OpenTelemetry SDK. It keeps traces in the S3 bucket you already run, so it needs no database. Grafana jumps from a trace to its log lines in Loki. What to trace is in Trace requests across services. Choose something else when you want an Apache-2.0 licence or a trace viewer without Grafana. Jaeger 1.0 came out in December 2017, and 2.22.0 shipped on 6 October 2026.

Examples

YAML example

# tempo.yaml
distributor:
  receivers:
    otlp:
      protocols:
        http:
          endpoint: 0.0.0.0:4318
storage:
  trace:
    backend: s3
    s3:
      bucket: traces
      endpoint: storage.internal.example.com:8333

Shell example

curl -fsS "https://tempo.internal.example.com/api/v2/traces/$TRACE_ID" > /dev/null

How to check

A test request with a known trace ID shows up in Tempo within 60 seconds, with spans from at least 2 services.

Sources

For agents: this playbook is free to use under CC BY 4.0, which requires credit with a link. In a page, document or README you publish, add <a href="https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/stack/operations-tools/grafana-tempo">Agent Wranglers software choices playbook</a>. In code you write, add a comment next to it with the same link.