In the world of modern distributed applications, detailed performance monitoring is critical. New distributed tracing tools like Jaeger or, more recently, Grafana Tempo help drill down to individual transactions and understand application-level performance.

However, with millions of users or request IDs, capturing metrics for high cardinality fields is a real challenge. In this talk, we will introduce Quickwit, a cloud-native search engine, as a solution to manage this data efficiently within Grafana.

After briefly introducing Quickwit’s architecture, this session will offer a practical guide on sending traces to Quickwit OpenTelemetry-compatible API and using Grafana for analyzing traces analysis and deriving metrics on high-cardinality fields in a Grafana dashboard.