Grafana Cloud Traces is a managed distributed tracing system powered by Grafana Tempo. The service provides trace storage and query capabilities for understanding request flows and data movement across software systems. The platform supports multiple trace formats including OpenTelemetry, Jaeger, and Zipkin, allowing organizations to instrument applications with minimal code changes. OpenTelemetry auto-instrumentation enables trace collection without adding new code. The system automatically generates request rate, error rate, and latency metrics from trace data. Users can query traces using TraceQL, which follows design principles similar to PromQL and LogQL. An Explore Traces app provides visualization without requiring query knowledge. The architecture uses object storage and Apache Parquet columnar format for trace storage. A parallel query engine scans terabytes of traces per second. The system integrates with Grafana visualizations, allowing users to correlate traces with metrics and logs through exemplars, correlations, and data links. Traces can be sent via Grafana Agent or OpenTelemetry Collector. The service generates service maps and RED metrics from trace data. Users can build dashboards and visualizations from trace data within Grafana. The platform offers horizontal scalability for handling high trace volumes from microservices architectures. Retention periods and storage limits vary by pricing tier.