grafana-tempo

What is grafana-tempo?

The Grafana Tempo image packages Tempo, an open-source distributed tracing backend developed by Grafana Labs. Tempo is designed to ingest and store massive volumes of trace data at low cost, without requiring indexing. Instead, it relies on object storage like S3, GCS, or MinIO and uses trace IDs for retrieval.

Tempo integrates seamlessly with Grafana, enabling developers and operators to visualize distributed traces alongside metrics and logs. It works well with tracing instrumentation libraries such as OpenTelemetry, and supports ingestion from sources like Jaeger, Zipkin, and OTLP.

Because of its scalability and cost efficiency, Tempo is widely used in observability stacks where teams want to correlate logs, metrics, and traces without running heavy infrastructure.

How to use this image

The Grafana Tempo image is typically run as part of an observability stack, either as a single binary in development or as a distributed deployment in production.

Examples:

<code># Run Tempo with a local config file
docker run --rm -v $PWD/tempo.yaml:/etc/tempo.yaml -p 3200:3200 grafana/tempo:latest -config.file=/etc/tempo.yaml</code>

<code># Ingest traces via OTLP
otel-collector -> Tempo endpoint at http://localhost:4317</code>

<code># Query traces with Grafana
http://localhost:3200</code>

In Kubernetes, Tempo is often deployed using the Grafana Helm chart, which can install Tempo alongside Loki and Grafana for a full observability stack.

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Image variants

The Grafana Tempo image is typically available in these forms:

grafana/tempo:<version>

Version-pinned images (e.g., grafana/tempo:2.5.0) are recommended for production use.

grafana/tempo:latest

Tracks the most recent stable release. Good for local testing or evaluation but not ideal for production clusters.

grafana/tempo:nightly

Built from the latest commits. Intended for contributors or teams testing upcoming features.