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12 – Bonus: Cheatsheets, Interview Prep, and Templates

Quick Reference (Printable)​

  • Collector pipeline syntax: receivers → processors → exporters.
  • Common ports: Grafana 3000, Tempo 3200, OTLP gRPC 4317, OTLP HTTP 4318, Loki 3100, Prometheus 9090.
  • TraceQL patterns: duration > 500ms, attributes["http.status_code"] >= 500, span.service.name = "orders".

Interview Questions (Examples)​

  • Explain context propagation and baggage.
  • Head-based vs tail-based sampling trade-offs.
  • Why is index-free storage advantageous for Tempo?
  • Design a tracing pipeline for a multi-tenant SaaS.

Templates​

  • Docker Compose lab stack (Section 5).
  • Helm values for Tempo distributed (Section 10).
  • Span naming matrix for your org (fill-in template).

Free vs Paid Vendors​

  • Open-source: Tempo + Loki + Prometheus = cost-efficient, portable, flexible.
  • Vendors (Datadog, Dynatrace, New Relic, Honeycomb): faster onboarding, managed infra, added analytics—but consider lock-in and ingestion costs.

Next Steps​

  • Add more languages to your lab.
  • Integrate CI-based TraceQL smoke tests.
  • Share runbooks and cheatsheets across teams.