How to find traces in Tempo with Elasticsearch and Grafana

Grafana Tempo, a distributed tracing backend, integrates with other data sources like Elasticsearch to facilitate trace discovery by storing and retrieving traces by ID. This tutorial guides users through setting up Elasticsearch and Tempo, using Grafana for visualization, and establishing data links that connect logs to traces via a traceID field. Although JSON is commonly used in the Elasticsearch ecosystem, Grafana Labs prefers logfmt formatting, requiring specific configuration to extract and map logfmt key/value pairs into Elasticsearch fields. By leveraging these integrations, users can enhance their tracing capabilities using their existing Elasticsearch logging backends. The post also encourages users to experiment with the setup and share feedback through Grafana's community channels, highlighting the flexibility and potential of using Tempo alongside Elasticsearch for efficient trace discovery.