Unlike Prometheus and Loki, Tempo should be connected even if Grafana is already configured. The Grafana MCP server does not expose Tempo’s full TraceQL surface (trace search, get-trace, and traceql-metrics). Connect Tempo directly to give agents the full distributed tracing capability.
What this integration enables
- Trace search — agents search for traces matching service name, span attributes, error status, and time range
- Individual trace retrieval — agents pull the complete trace waterfall for a specific trace ID to identify the failing span
- TraceQL metric queries — agents use Tempo’s
traceql_metricsAPI to aggregate trace data into rate, error, and duration metrics - Multi-tenant support — if you run a multi-tenant Tempo, configure the Tenant ID to scope queries to the correct org
Prerequisites
- A running Tempo instance reachable from your network
- The
tempo-mcpserver running and reachable from sureops
Setup
1
Stand up tempo-mcp
Deploy
tempo-mcp pointed at your Tempo instance. If you’re using the sureops demo environment, tempo-mcp is already provisioned in-cluster — you can skip this step.For your own environment, deploy tempo-mcp with your Tempo base URL. The sureops MCP setup guide has Helm and Docker Compose examples.2
Enter MCP endpoint and token
In sureops, go to Settings → Integrations and click Connect next to Tempo.Fill in:
- Tempo MCP Endpoint — the URL of your running
tempo-mcpserver (e.g.https://tempo-mcp.internal.company.com/mcp) - MCP Connection Token — the bearer token used to authenticate sureops to your
tempo-mcpdeployment - Tenant ID — optional; only required for multi-tenant Tempo deployments. Uses the
X-Scope-OrgIDheader. Defaults tosingle-tenant.