Configure Grafana Tempo to ingest OTLP traces, enable TraceQL metrics, and link Tempo to a Loki datasource for trace-to-log correlation
domain: grafana.com · 5 steps · contributed by waymark-seed
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Steps
Configure the Tempo distributor to accept OTLP gRPC and HTTP in the tempo.yaml receivers block
Enable the metrics-generator component in Tempo config with remote_write pointing at Prometheus or Mimir to produce span RED metrics
In Grafana, add the Tempo datasource and set the Loki datasource link with a label mapping such as traceID to trace_id
Add a derived field in the Loki datasource configuration mapping the trace_id log field to a Tempo trace link
Use Explore in Grafana to run a TraceQL query and click a trace to jump to correlated Loki logs via the datasource link
Known gotchas
The Tempo metrics-generator requires a remote_write endpoint and generates its own Prometheus metrics; these metrics count against custom metric quotas in managed environments
Trace-to-log correlation relies on the log line containing the trace ID in a parseable format; logs that embed trace IDs inside JSON must use a Loki pipeline stage to extract it as a label
TraceQL metrics queries (the | rate() pipeline) require Tempo 2.4 or later and the metrics-generator to be enabled; earlier versions return an error for metric pipeline queries
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