Grafana Tempo 1.2 introduces significant improvements, including the first version to support trace search, enabling Grafana Cloud users to locate recent traces through basic filtering. This feature, although experimental, enhances performance, making Tempo 1.2 approximately 1.5 to 2 times more efficient than its predecessor. The update also includes a scalable single binary mode, combining components into one package for easier management while maintaining distributed setup behavior. Despite some minor breaking changes, such as API adjustments and metric renaming, the release lays the groundwork for future advancements like full backend search and trace metric aggregation. Tempo's integration into Grafana Cloud's free tier allows users to explore up to 50GB of traces, alongside logs and metrics, offering a practical entry point into Grafana's observability tools.