01 – Introduction

Distributed tracing helps you see the full journey of a request as it moves across multiple services in a system. It shows where time is spent and where problems may occur.

Grafana Tempo is a tracing backend designed for high performance and low cost. It does not need any complex databases — it only uses object storage like S3, GCS, or MinIO.

Tempo works seamlessly with other Grafana tools such as Grafana (UI), Prometheus/Mimir (metrics), and Loki (logs). It also supports standard tracing formats like Jaeger, Zipkin, and OpenTelemetry, making it easy to integrate with existing applications.