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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/AspectGreptimeDBGrafana Tempo
Data ModelUnified Observability DatabaseDistributed Tracing Backend
Value ModelMulti-Value (supports complex data structures)Trace spans with attributes
Multi-model SupportMetrics, Logs & Traces in one databaseTraces only (requires separate systems for metrics/logs)
Query LanguagesSQL & PromQL (dual interface)TraceQL
Ingestion ProtocolsSQL
gRPC
InfluxDB Line Protocol
Prometheus Remote Storage
OpenTelemetry
Loki Push API
Elasticsearch Bulk API
HTTP API
Jaeger
Zipkin
OpenTelemetry
OTLP
Data RetentionFlexible TTL policies with tiered storageObject storage-based retention with compaction
Continuous AggregationBuilt-in SQL aggregation, Pipeline ETL engine & Flow streaming computationService maps and span metrics generation
Deployment ComplexitySingle system deploymentMulti-component deployment (Distributor, Ingester, Querier, Compactor)
Use CasesUnified observability, real-time analytics, IoT monitoring, edge computingDistributed tracing, request flow analysis, latency troubleshooting
ArchitectureCloud-native distributed with compute-storage separationMicroservices architecture with object storage backend
Storage FormatApache Parquet (columnar, compressed)Parquet files in object storage
Storage ScalabilityObject storage integration with unlimited capacityNative object storage design for unlimited scale
High AvailabilityNative clustering with automatic failoverStateless components with object storage persistence
LicenseApache 2.0Apache 2.0
Written LanguageRust (memory safety, performance)Go (ecosystem compatibility)
Deployment OptionsSingle-node, cluster, Kubernetes-native, edge-to-cloud with unified APIMicroservices mode, scalable mode with object storage
Operational ComplexitySingle unified system with simplified Kubernetes operationsRequires coordination with Prometheus and Loki for full observability

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