The latest release of Grafana Tempo brings a number of exciting updates, including MCP server support, which lets you leverage LLMs to access and analyze tracing data.

Grafana is an open-source analytics and monitoring platform that allows users to visualize and analyze metrics from various data sources. The Grafana blog covers topics such as data visualization, monitoring best practices, and new features in Grafana software. Developers and data engineers can learn how to leverage Grafana for monitoring infrastructure, analyzing performance metrics, and creating interactive dashboards for data-driven decision-making.

Grafana Labs

Grafana Tempo 2.9 introduces MCP server support enabling LLMs like Claude to query and analyze distributed tracing data through TraceQL. The release adds query sampling hints to speed up metrics queries by returning approximate results, particularly useful for high-volume environments. New operational improvements include metrics for monitoring query I/O and span timestamp distances, plus enhanced cost-attribution tracking with resource and span-level scoping for multi-tenant deployments. The team is also working on vParquet5 block format and Project Rhythm architecture to improve scalability and reduce operational costs.

Grafana Tempo 2.9 release: MCP server support, TraceQL metrics sampling, and more

Analyze tracing data with LLMs: MCP server support

Speed up your queries: TraceQL metrics sampling

Operational improvements for multi-tenant environments

How to learn more — and what’s next for Grafana Tempo