[pushrax]

I agree, if anything the eventual goal should be to invert it. In applications I work on right now, trace tags contain the richest and best-described request metadata. Tags are indexed differently depending on their cardinality, and there is no cardinality limit.

Tempo's implementation seems pragmatic as a short to medium term solution though. Log engines still have a lot more investment and maturity than trace engines. In my work, even though the trace tags contain the best data quality, the tracing system is currently worse at answering a good deal of my questions. It's simply that Splunk has many tools that work well, and the tracing system is behind.

[cbsmith]

But Jaeger, as an example, will let you choose what back-end engine you want to store your traces in. There is no need to reinvent the wheel just for tracing. You can just leverage what is already out there.