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Freedom251 › Blog › distributed tracing

Grafana Tempo 3.1 adds query-based trace redaction and sampling-aware TraceQL metrics

By Freedom251 Team · · 5 min read

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Grafana Tempo 3.1, announced September 30, 2026, makes two major observability tasks more practical: operators can redact every matching trace with a TraceQL selector, and metrics queries can compensate for head-based sampling. The v3.1.0 tag was published September 29. The release also adds arithmetic to TraceQL metrics, faster span-only reads on vParquet5, Kafka security and connectivity improvements, service-graph changes, span pruning, and experimental trace-comparison tooling.

What Tempo 3.1 changes

Tempo 3.1 is a substantial operational release rather than a format-breaking migration. New blocks are written as vParquet5 by default, while Tempo continues to read existing vParquet4 and vParquet3 blocks. That lets an upgrade use the new query and performance features without rewriting the entire historical store.

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Area Earlier Tempo behavior Tempo 3.1 behavior
Trace redaction Tempo 3.0 could target explicit trace IDs. Redaction jobs accept a TraceQL selector and optional --start/--end bounds.
Sampled metrics Rates reflected retained spans when head sampling removed traffic. with(extrapolate=true) can scale counts and rates using sampling probability in span metadata.
Metrics expressions Related aggregations had to be combined by a client. +, -, *, and / work directly in TraceQL metrics.
Block format Existing vParquet3 and vParquet4 blocks remain readable. New blocks use vParquet5 by default.
Metrics reads Span-only fetching was not the default path on older block formats. Span-only fetching is enabled by default for metrics queries on vParquet5 blocks.

Redact traces by attribute instead of collecting trace IDs

Query-based redaction is useful when sensitive data appears in many traces and the affected IDs are not known in advance. A TraceQL selector can match an attribute value, allowing one job to find all matching traces in the relevant blocks.

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Run a safe dry run first

The official launch example uses tempo-cli redact with --dry-run. Tempo evaluates the query and reports how many traces it would remove without modifying blocks:

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tempo-cli redact 
  --tenant=<TENANT_ID> 
  --query '{span.attribute = "<leaked PII>"}' 
  --dry-run 
  <SCHEDULER_ADDRESS>:<GRPC_PORT>

Replace the tenant, attribute expression, and scheduler address with values from your deployment. Check the match count and the selector carefully before submitting a destructive job.

Bound a job to a time window

Tempo 3.1 adds --start and --end so a redaction can be restricted to a defined period. This is important when an attribute was leaked only during a particular incident and older or newer data must remain intact.

There is a strict rollout requirement: every scheduler and worker must run Tempo 3.1 before a windowed redaction is submitted. The release notes warn that an older worker ignores the window and redacts every query match in the block, without reporting an error. Upgrade and verify the complete scheduler/worker fleet first, then run a dry run with the same selector and bounds you intend to use.

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What this does not do

Query-based selection does not make redaction reversible or risk-free. It changes matching stored data, so retain the deployment’s normal backups and change-approval controls. A broad selector can remove substantially more data than an explicit list of trace IDs; a dry run is the practical control for detecting that scope.

Make TraceQL metrics account for head sampling

Head-based sampling keeps only a fraction of incoming spans. An ordinary rate over the retained data therefore describes the sampled stream, not the estimated unsampled traffic. Grafana’s release notes use a 10% sampling example: an unsampled rate of 500 spans per second appears as approximately 50 spans per second in { } | rate().

Enable extrapolation on compatible data

Tempo 3.1 adds the experimental with(extrapolate=true) hint. It uses sampling probability recorded in span metadata to estimate the underlying count or rate:

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{ } | rate() with(extrapolate=true)

The hint belongs at the end of the metrics query. Extrapolation requires vParquet4 or later blocks. Queries against vParquet3 ignore the hint, so a mixed historical store can produce different behavior depending on which blocks are read.

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Calculate sampled error fractions in one query

Arithmetic makes ratios such as an error fraction expressible in TraceQL itself. The release notes show this sampled-error example:

({status=error} | rate()) / ({} | rate()) with(extrapolate=true)

The numerator measures error traffic, the denominator measures total traffic, and the extrapolation hint applies to the metrics expression. Sampling metadata must be present for the correction to be meaningful; the hint cannot reconstruct probabilities that were never recorded.

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Use arithmetic for other derived metrics

Tempo 3.1 supports addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division in TraceQL metrics queries. That removes the need for an external client to join separate aggregations for many dashboards and alerts. The release does not change the meaning of the underlying selectors, so scope each numerator and denominator deliberately when building a ratio.

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Faster metrics reads with span-only fetching

For metrics queries on vParquet5 blocks, Tempo 3.1 enables the span-only fetch path by default. Grafana reports that a warmed { } | rate() test completed in slightly over half the time required with span-only fetching disabled. Its sampling documentation says heavy queries such as { } | rate() show improvements of two to four times; actual latency depends on data shape, storage, cache state, and query concurrency.

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Operators can disable the optimization for a tenant with metrics_spanonly_fetch: false. A per-query override, with(spanonly_fetch=false), is available when the documented unsafe-query-hint setting is enabled. Keep the default unless a specific query exposes a compatibility or correctness problem, and test overrides against representative blocks rather than assuming the benchmark applies to every workload.

Other operational changes in 3.1

  • Kafka: authentication and TLS options are improved, and additional Kafka-compatible backends are supported.
  • Service graphs: topology detection is improved under heavy sampling, while metrics-generator and service-graph overhead is reduced.
  • Trace reads: optional span pruning is available for trace-by-ID v2.
  • Investigation tools: experimental trace-comparison tools are included for comparing traces during diagnosis.

These additions are independent of query-based redaction and extrapolated metrics, so teams can adopt them selectively after validating their own deployment and storage settings.

Upgrade checklist for an existing Tempo deployment

  1. Upgrade the scheduler and every worker to Tempo 3.1 before submitting any redaction that uses --start or --end.
  2. Confirm that new writes use vParquet5 and that the deployment can still read its vParquet3 and vParquet4 history.
  3. Run a non-destructive redaction dry run and review the match count before changing blocks.
  4. For sampled dashboards, verify that spans contain sampling-probability metadata and that the queried blocks are vParquet4 or newer.
  5. Test representative metrics queries with the default span-only path, then investigate any regression before applying a tenant-wide or query-level disablement.
  6. Review Kafka authentication, TLS, and backend configuration if the deployment uses the newly supported connectivity options.

Compatibility and decision guide

Need Tempo 3.1 capability Requirement or caution
Remove data matching a leaked attribute TraceQL-based redaction Use --dry-run; all schedulers and workers must be 3.1 for windowed jobs.
Estimate unsampled rates with(extrapolate=true) Requires sampling metadata and vParquet4+; vParquet3 ignores the hint.
Compute an error ratio or other derived metric TraceQL arithmetic Use +, -, *, and / in the metrics expression.
Reduce metrics-query latency Default span-only fetch on vParquet5 Reported gains vary by workload; disable only with a demonstrated need.
Preserve historical data during upgrade Read support for vParquet3 and vParquet4 New blocks are written as vParquet5.

Bottom line for operators

Tempo 3.1 turns attribute-driven deletion and sampling-aware metrics into built-in workflows, but both features have boundaries that matter in production. Treat a redaction window as a fleet-wide upgrade task, validate its scope with a dry run, and use extrapolation only where sampling metadata and vParquet4-or-newer blocks make the estimate valid. Existing vParquet3 and vParquet4 data remains readable while new vParquet5 blocks unlock the faster default metrics path.

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distributed tracingGrafana TempoobservabilityOpenTelemetryTempo 3.1TraceQL

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