Tag
Grafana Tempo 3.1 stores distributed traces and queries them with TraceQL. In Docker Compose one container in monolithic mode is enough, with no Kafka, using Alloy as the OpenTelemetry collector and Grafana to explore them. Since 3.1 it writes vParquet5 blocks and supports arithmetic in TraceQL metrics; coming from 2.x, the config has to be migrated.
The OTel GenAI spec stabilizes attributes for LLMs, tools, and agents. Practical Python implementation with Anthropic + Grafana Tempo.
After a decade of Prometheus, three years of consolidation around OpenTelemetry, and the open stack now mature with Grafana, Loki, and Tempo, concrete recommendations for teams starting or reviewing their observability layer: what fits, what is excess, and what to avoid.
Agents that chain calls to models, tools and memory are hard to debug without instrumentation designed for them. After a long year running agents in production, I cover what to measure first, which standards are consolidating, and which costly mistakes are avoided by getting the traces right from the start.
Grafana Beyla is an eBPF agent that automatically instruments existing applications without touching their code: it observes kernel syscalls and generates OpenTelemetry traces and RED metrics for services written in Go, Java, Python, Node, and Rust. It gives broad, immediate coverage, but it does not replace the manual SDK for business metrics and internal logic.
OpenTelemetry declared logs signals stable in July 2024. The third pillar of modern observability finally joins metrics and traces under a single protocol and a shared data model.
OpenTelemetry is the CNCF project, graduated in May 2026, that unifies logs, metrics, and traces under one SDK and the OTLP protocol, without locking you into a single backend. Traces have been stable since 2021 and metrics since 2023; logs are still maturing, but already worth adopting on new projects.
