Difference between Loki, Grafana, Tempo, OTEL & their use cases.

📰 Medium · DevOps

Learn the difference between Loki, Grafana, Tempo, OTEL and their use cases in the observability stack, covering metrics, traces, and logs.

intermediate Published 19 Apr 2026

Action Steps

Install OpenTelemetry (OTel) in your application to generate unified metrics, traces, and logs
Use the OTel Collector to process and export telemetry data to backends like Prometheus, Tempo, Loki, or Jaeger
Configure Loki for log management and analysis
Set up Tempo for trace management and analysis
Visualize metrics, logs, and traces using Grafana

Who Needs to Know This

DevOps teams and developers can benefit from understanding the roles of these tools in monitoring and troubleshooting applications.

Key Insight

💡 OpenTelemetry (OTel) is a vendor-neutral standard for generating metrics, traces, and logs, while Loki, Tempo, and Grafana provide storage, analysis, and visualization capabilities.