Start with Grafana Cloud Tempo (open-source tracing, managed)
Grafana Cloud Tempo provides distributed tracing with OpenTelemetry compatibility and TraceQL queries. You keep data portability and avoid vendor lock-in on your tracing pipeline. Pair with Grafana dashboards for visualization.
- Recommendation: Grafana Cloud
Recommended starting points
Based on your constraints, these products typically fit best. Read each decision brief to confirm pricing behavior and limits match your reality.
Grafana Cloud
Managed observability on open-source foundations (Grafana, Prometheus, Loki, Tempo). Metrics via PromQL, logs via LogQL, traces via TraceQL. Free tier: 10K active series, 50GB logs/month.
Why this recommendation
Grafana Cloud Tempo provides distributed tracing with OpenTelemetry compatibility and TraceQL queries. You keep data portability and avoid vendor lock-in on your tracing pipeline. Pair with Grafana dashboards for visualization.