Grafana Tempo 1.4 introduces a new optional component called the metrics generator, which produces RED metrics and service graphs from traces automatically, enhancing Grafana Cloud's capabilities and available in both Grafana Enterprise Traces 1.3 and Tempo 1.4. This update, which includes bug fixes and breaking changes, allows for seamless transition from metrics to traces by writing exemplars to the storage backend, thus maintaining existing instrumentation. Additionally, Grafana has announced plans to adopt the open, columnar Parquet format for better search performance and introduced the upcoming TraceQL query language. Users are encouraged to engage with the community for further developments and can access Tempo features via Grafana Cloud, which offers a free tier with 50GB of traces.