Grafana Tempo 2.6 introduces significant performance improvements and a range of new features for TraceQL, built on the enhanced vParquet4 backend now set as the default block format. Key updates include the ability to discover span events by name, custom attributes, or elapsed time, and enhanced querying for span links and arrays, with native support for searching arrays like HTTP headers. The update removes RF3 metrics in favor of a more efficient RF1 implementation, which aims to improve performance, durability, and availability, leading to lower total cost of ownership and more efficient TraceQL searches. Enhanced features such as native histogram support, exemplars in TraceQL metrics, and improved memory consumption in blocklist polling are also part of this release, addressing the needs of multi-tenant cluster operators. The ongoing initiatives focus on making TraceQL metrics generally available and re-architecting to RF1 to meet performance objectives, inviting community engagement through forums and monthly calls. Users are encouraged to explore the latest updates on Grafana Cloud, which offers a free tier including 50GB of traces, logs, and 10K metric series.