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About Grafana Tempo
Grafana Tempo is a high-scale, cost-effective distributed tracing backend designed to store and query trace data. Developed by Grafana Labs, Tempo is built to handle massive volumes of trace data without requiring sampling. It uses object storage (S3, GCS, Azure) as its primary storage, making it cost-effective for long-term retention. Tempo integrates seamlessly with Grafana for visualization and supports multiple trace protocols including Jaeger, Zipkin, and OpenTelemetry. It's designed to work alongside Prometheus and Loki to provide a complete observability stack.
GreptimeDB vs. Grafana Tempo
| Feature/Aspect | GreptimeDB | Grafana Tempo |
|---|---|---|
| Data Model | Unified Observability Database | Distributed Tracing Backend |
| Value Model | Multi-Value (supports complex data structures) | Trace spans with attributes |
| Multi-model Support | Metrics, Logs & Traces in one database | Traces only (requires separate systems for metrics/logs) |
| Query Languages | SQL & PromQL (dual interface) | TraceQL |
| Ingestion Protocols | SQL gRPC InfluxDB Line Protocol Prometheus Remote Storage OpenTelemetry Loki Push API Elasticsearch Bulk API HTTP API | Jaeger Zipkin OpenTelemetry OTLP |
| Data Retention | Flexible TTL policies with tiered storage | Object storage-based retention with compaction |
| Continuous Aggregation | Built-in SQL aggregation, Pipeline ETL engine & Flow streaming computation | Service maps and span metrics generation |
| Deployment Complexity | Single system deployment | Multi-component deployment (Distributor, Ingester, Querier, Compactor) |
| Use Cases | Unified observability, real-time analytics, IoT monitoring, edge computing | Distributed tracing, request flow analysis, latency troubleshooting |
| Architecture | Cloud-native distributed with compute-storage separation | Microservices architecture with object storage backend |
| Storage Format | Apache Parquet (columnar, compressed) | Parquet files in object storage |
| Storage Scalability | Object storage integration with unlimited capacity | Native object storage design for unlimited scale |
| High Availability | Native clustering with automatic failover | Stateless components with object storage persistence |
| License | Apache 2.0 | Apache 2.0 |
| Written Language | Rust (memory safety, performance) | Go (ecosystem compatibility) |
| Deployment Options | Single-node, cluster, Kubernetes-native, edge-to-cloud with unified API | Microservices mode, scalable mode with object storage |
| Operational Complexity | Single unified system with simplified Kubernetes operations | Requires coordination with Prometheus and Loki for full observability |
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