Skip to main content
RunBook Academy

← All break/fix scenarios in Observability

intermediatetempo-ingestion~25 min

Break/Fix: Tempo Receives No Traces

Reported symptoms

  • Tempo has no traces from a service

Evidence

  • · tempo_ingester_spans_received total = 0
Diagnosis and resolutionclick to reveal

Root cause

The collector / exporter is failing.

Remediation

1. Check collector logs. 2. Verify instrumentation. 3. Fix.

Verification

Traces appear in Tempo

Prevention

Auto-instrumentation at the SDK level

Scenario

You are operating a production observability platform. The following symptoms appear:

  • Tempo has no traces from a service

Available evidence:

  • tempo_ingester_spans_received total = 0

Your task

Determine the cause, recover, document, and validate.

Investigation

The investigation follows the discipline taught in Part XCVIII:

  1. Form hypothesis, find evidence, test, validate.
  2. Use the available evidence above to bound the search.
  3. Reach one of the likely root causes.

Recovery procedure

(Do not reveal until you have reasoned through the problem.)

  1. Identify the failing component.
  2. Apply the remediation pathway.
  3. Validate with the verification step.
  4. Document the incident.

Remediation

  1. Check collector logs. 2. Verify instrumentation. 3. Fix.

Verification

Traces appear in Tempo

Rollback

Revert

Prevention

Auto-instrumentation at the SDK level