# Grafana Tempo (/docs/foundation/components/grafana-tempo)



## Component Category [#component-category]

Monitoring and debugging / distributed tracing

## Component Description [#component-description]

Grafana Tempo is a distributed tracing backend designed to store and query traces at scale.

## Why It Is Used [#why-it-is-used]

In BullSequana AI Foundation, Tempo helps operators follow requests across multiple services, understand latency paths, and diagnose issues that span system boundaries.

## Learn More [#learn-more]

* [Grafana Tempo documentation](https://grafana.com/docs/tempo/latest/)
* [grafana/tempo on GitHub](https://github.com/grafana/tempo)

## Deployment notes [#deployment-notes]

Tempo deploys in distributed mode in the `tempo` namespace at sync wave 10 in the common tier. Trace data is stored in the configured S3-compatible object-storage backend, either the in-cluster Rook-Ceph RGW service or the site's external S3 service. A memcached layer provides store-level caching.

## Interacts With [#interacts-with]

* `Grafana`, which uses Tempo for trace exploration and trace-to-logs or trace-to-metrics navigation.
* `Prometheus`, through Tempo metrics, service monitors, and span-metrics generation.
* `Rook Ceph`, which provides S3-compatible object storage for Tempo trace data through RGW.
* Instrumented platform services, which send traces into Tempo through the telemetry pipeline.