A slow request may cross several services before it finishes, making individual service logs difficult to piece together. Grafana Tempo stores distributed traces: linked records of the work performed along a request’s path. Teams can query those traces to investigate where time was spent or failures occurred. Applications and collectors must produce and deliver the trace data first. Tempo also needs a deliberate access boundary, storage and retention plan; deploying the backend alone does not instrument an application.
Deploying Tempo alone does not generate useful traces; sampling, propagation and service identity need an owner.
Chart ownership
Grafana's Kubernetes deployment documentation points to grafana-community/helm-charts for monolithic and distributed charts. The tempo-distributed documentation identifies community ownership. Choose the chart and deployment mode deliberately instead of treating an older Grafana repository command as the current distribution.
Before adoption
Tempo does not include an authentication layer; put an authenticating boundary in front of exposed services. Protect trace attributes that may contain confidential application data. Plan object storage, retention and ingestion buffering for the selected version. Distributed architecture and required dependencies can change across major releases, so read both chart and Tempo migration instructions before upgrading. Verify that collectors and queries can tolerate the planned maintenance window.
Start with Grafana's Kubernetes deployment guidance and the linked chart documentation.
Sources & further reading
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