When it comes to monitoring, diagnosing, and optimizing the performance of complex systems today, you can’t really go wrong with tracing tools. And while OpenTelemetry has become the go-to choice for instrumenting apps and collecting traces, there are several other options in the backend that can effectively store, manage, and analyze traces sent by OpenTelemetry. Two of these open-source tools are Jaeger and Grafana Tempo. In this article, we’ll compare and contrast the two.