Grafana Tempo 1.3 has been released. The open source backend for distributed tracing comes from Grafana Labs, which offers monitoring and logging tools. Grafana Tempo has its origins in 2020 and released in June 2021 in version 1.0. It can be used in Grafana Cloud as well as installed, managed and scaled by yourself. The current release is again dedicated to the search function, which Grafana Labs has been working on for several versions.
Search function in the backend datastore
As already announced in the previous version Grafana Tempo 1.2, version 1.3 has a full backend search on board. It will also soon find its way into the Grafana Cloud Traces observability platform. The Grafana UI (User Interface) for the new search function is the same as for searching recent trace data.
Grafana Tempo 1.3 introduces a full backend datastore search.
(Image: Grafana Labs)
Currently, the backend search still takes a relatively long time – searching for a few parameters should sometimes take 10 to 20 seconds, according to Grafana Labs the limitation is due to the backend formats. Future versions of Grafana Tempo should significantly speed up the search.
According to the documentation, the search function is still an experimental feature, which affects both the search for recent traces and the new advanced backend search.
Breaking changes
Grafana Tempo 1.3 brings some backwards incompatible updates, including updating the OpenTelemetry libraries to version 0.40. This changes the standard OTLP gRPC listening port from the legacy port 55680 to the new port 4317. The moving of two search-related configuration settings associated with the full backend search is also considered a breaking change.
The relevant settings were previously found here:
query_frontend:
search_default_result_limit: <int>
search_max_result_limit: <int>In Grafana Tempo 1.3 they can be found here:
query_frontend:
search:
default_result_limit: <int>
max_result_limit: <int>In the future, Grafana Labs plans to change the backend trace format to make searching more efficient.
All further details about the new release can be found on the Grafana Labs blog and the changelog.
(May)