Introducing Grafana Enterprise Traces

Grafana Enterprise Traces (GET) is built on a unique approach to trace indexing, storage, and administration control that allows companies to run it securely at scale. Everyone in an organization can access all of their relevant trace data, and companies that have specific security policies or are in regulated industries can leverage the built-in Grafana interface to easily manage permissions and settings and grant individuals access to the resources they need without compromising cost.

Tenant management

Like Tempo, Grafana Enterprise Traces has a natively multi-tenant architecture. This is critical for centralized observability teams trying to offer tracing-as-a-service to their internal customers, while trying to keep their management burden under control. With multi-tenancy, observability teams can run a single GET cluster but provide each of their customer teams a logically isolated partition for their data. GET makes a multi-tenant setup even easier to manage by providing an administrative API and plugin for creating, deleting, and editing tenants as well as per-tenant read and write load limits.  This API and plugin follow the same design patterns used in our Enterprise Metrics and Enterprise Logs products, making it easy for an operator of one to get started with the others.  GET makes it easy for you to create new tenants, set limits for each of them so they don’t interfere with one another and give each team the experience of having their own dedicated tracing backend.

Security

Grafana Enterprise Traces includes the security features enterprises need to scale traces for large, distributed teams. Robust data access policies enable administrators to secure and govern data in order to control where their traces live and who gets to use them.

• Admins can use the built-in interface or a simple API to create access policies and generate tokens that grant or restrict individual access to resources.
• Access policies can be defined with realms and scopes so the administrator can specify which tenants a user has access to, as well as the type of access: read, write, or delete. 
• GET’s authentication layer supports the OpenID Connect standard, making it easy for observability teams to integrate with existing token providers at their organization.  GET ships with native authentication support, the ability to define fine-grained access policies.

A global view of trace data

Large enterprises may find themselves running multiple GET clusters for a variety of reasons. They may have operations in multiple geographic regions and want to have a cluster per region. They may want multiple GET clusters, each receiving the same trace data, to provide high availability and redundancy in case a single cluster goes down. Or they may want to separate traces from different environments (production and development, for example) so they can manage two smaller clusters instead of one massive one and limit the blast radius if one goes down.  In these setups, users may sometimes need to look for a trace across all GET clusters simultaneously. To meet this need, GET includes the ability to do query federation — fanning a query out to multiple clusters and then combining the results before returning them to the user. This provides large organizations a global view across all of their tracing backends. 

Correlation between metrics, logs, and traces 

Understanding all your telemetry data — and the relationships between it — is important. Grafana Enterprise Traces allows you to seamlessly move from Prometheus metrics into relevant traces via exemplars. It also enables seamless transition between logs and traces. Starting from Grafana Enterprise Logs or open source Loki, users can filter down to the log lines they care about, and from there they can open up the view of the relevant trace with a single click using the derived fields support in Grafana.   As all of this follows a holistic design, moving seamlessly between metrics, logs, and traces has become possible at truly cloud native scale. 

Support

With Grafana Enterprise Traces, teams get support, training, and consulting provided by the Grafana Labs team, including the creators and maintainers of Tempo. We’ll help with anything organizations need to implement Tempo and Grafana Enterprise Traces.