name: Tempo Vocabulary description: Domain vocabulary and taxonomy for Grafana Tempo distributed tracing, covering OpenTelemetry concepts, TraceQL query language, and observability terminology. version: "1.0.0" created: "2026-05-03" modified: "2026-05-03" domains: - name: Distributed Tracing description: Core distributed tracing concepts from the OpenTelemetry data model terms: - term: Trace definition: A complete end-to-end record of a single request or transaction as it flows through a distributed system. Composed of a tree of spans sharing the same trace ID. synonyms: [Request Trace, Distributed Trace] tags: [Distributed Tracing, OpenTelemetry] - term: Span definition: The basic unit of work in distributed tracing, representing a single operation within a trace. Contains a name, start/end timestamps, attributes, events, and status. synonyms: [Trace Span, Operation] tags: [Distributed Tracing, OpenTelemetry] - term: Trace ID definition: A globally unique 128-bit identifier assigned to a trace. All spans in the same trace share the same trace ID. Represented as a 32-character hexadecimal string. tags: [Distributed Tracing] - term: Span ID definition: A 64-bit identifier unique within a trace. Each span has a unique span ID. Represented as a 16-character hexadecimal string. tags: [Distributed Tracing] - term: Parent Span ID definition: The span ID of the parent span, establishing the causal relationship between spans. Root spans have no parent span ID. tags: [Distributed Tracing] - term: Root Span definition: The first span in a trace, representing the entry point of a request. Has no parent span ID. Usually represents the top-level service call. synonyms: [Entry Span, Top-Level Span] tags: [Distributed Tracing] - term: Span Kind definition: "Classification of a span's role in the request flow. Values: Internal (within a process), Server (handles incoming RPC), Client (outgoing RPC), Producer (async message send), Consumer (async message receive)." tags: [Distributed Tracing, OpenTelemetry] - term: Span Status definition: The outcome of a span's operation. Values are Unset (default), Ok (success), or Error (failure with optional error message). tags: [Distributed Tracing, OpenTelemetry] - term: Span Attributes definition: Key-value pairs attached to a span providing additional context. OpenTelemetry defines semantic conventions for common attributes (http.method, db.system, service.name, etc.). synonyms: [Span Tags, Span Labels] tags: [Distributed Tracing, OpenTelemetry] - term: Span Events definition: Time-stamped annotations within a span, similar to log messages but correlated to the trace. Useful for recording exceptions, cache hits, or significant moments within an operation. synonyms: [Structured Log Events, Annotations] tags: [Distributed Tracing, OpenTelemetry] - name: OpenTelemetry description: The OpenTelemetry observability standard and data model terms: - term: OpenTelemetry definition: A CNCF observability framework providing vendor-neutral APIs, SDKs, and tooling for collecting, processing, and exporting traces, metrics, and logs. abbreviation: OTel, OTEL tags: [OpenTelemetry] - term: OTLP definition: OpenTelemetry Protocol — the wire format for transmitting traces, metrics, and logs between OpenTelemetry-instrumented services and observability backends. Supports gRPC and HTTP transports. abbreviation: OTLP tags: [OpenTelemetry] - term: Resource definition: A set of attributes describing the entity producing telemetry data (e.g., service.name, deployment.environment, host.name). Attached to all spans produced by a service instance. tags: [OpenTelemetry] - term: Instrumentation Scope definition: Identifies the instrumentation library that produced spans. Contains the library name and version. synonyms: [Instrumentation Library] tags: [OpenTelemetry] - term: Semantic Conventions definition: OpenTelemetry-defined standard attribute names and values for common operations (HTTP, database, messaging, etc.). Ensures consistent attribute naming across services. tags: [OpenTelemetry] - term: W3C Trace Context definition: W3C standard for propagating trace context across service boundaries via HTTP headers (traceparent, tracestate). Supported by OpenTelemetry and Tempo. tags: [OpenTelemetry, Standards] - name: TraceQL description: Grafana Tempo's query language for filtering and selecting traces and spans terms: - term: TraceQL definition: A query language developed for Grafana Tempo to filter spans within traces using a pipeline syntax. Supports attribute matchers, duration conditions, structural operators, and metrics generation. tags: [TraceQL, Query Language] - term: Span Selector definition: "The curly brace syntax in TraceQL for filtering spans based on attributes. Example: {.service.name=\"frontend\" && .http.status_code=500}" tags: [TraceQL] - term: Pipeline definition: A TraceQL chain of operators connected with >> for progressive span filtering and transformation. tags: [TraceQL] - term: Structural Operator definition: "TraceQL operators that express relationships between spans in a trace: child (>>), descendant (>), siblings, and union operations." tags: [TraceQL] - term: Intrinsic Attribute definition: "Special built-in TraceQL attributes not prefixed with a scope dot: name, duration, status, statusMessage, kind, traceDuration, rootName, rootService." tags: [TraceQL] - name: Tempo Platform description: Grafana Tempo-specific operational concepts terms: - term: Tempo definition: Grafana Tempo — a high-scale, cost-efficient distributed tracing backend designed for object storage (GCS, S3, Azure Blob). Designed to require only object storage with no external dependencies like Elasticsearch or Cassandra. tags: [Tempo, Grafana] - term: Tempo Microservices Mode definition: Deployment mode that splits Tempo into individual components (distributor, ingester, querier, compactor, etc.) for independent scaling. synonyms: [Tempo Distributed Mode] tags: [Tempo, Deployment] - term: Tempo Monolithic Mode definition: Simplified single-binary deployment mode where all Tempo components run in one process. Suitable for small deployments and development. synonyms: [All-in-One Mode] tags: [Tempo, Deployment] - term: Ingester definition: Tempo component responsible for receiving incoming trace data from distributors and writing it to temporary storage before flushing to the object store. tags: [Tempo, Architecture] - term: Querier definition: Tempo component that handles trace query requests by searching both in-memory ingesters and the object store backend. tags: [Tempo, Architecture] - term: Compactor definition: Tempo background component that compacts blocks in the object store to improve query performance and manage storage efficiently. tags: [Tempo, Architecture] - term: TraceQL Metrics definition: Tempo feature enabling generation of Prometheus-compatible time-series metrics from trace data using TraceQL metric functions (rate, count_over_time, histogram_over_time). tags: [Tempo, TraceQL, Metrics]