Currently, the configuration examples in the Configure and Manage documentation work with the standard Tempo configuration. They aren't set up to use with tempo-distributed Helm chart.

Summary of issues

The configuration values don't map between Tempo's configuration and the equivalent values in the tempo-distributed Helm chart. We could add a column to the values table in the tempo-distributed Helm chart README to map these values as a stop-gap.

The tempo-distributed Helm chart README has a table with a list of values. Most of these values are missing descriptions of what they do.

Configuration doc in Tempo OSS doesn't include instructions for using the values.yaml for Helm.

Exploration

• What is the future of the tempo-distributed Helm chart?
• Can we use something like tempo.config or config in the root directory to use the standard config examples? Example from mimir-distributed Helm chart: https://github.com/grafana/mimir/blob/main/operations/helm/charts/mimir-distributed/values.yaml#L118-L121

How do we fix it?

Determine the scope and prioritize work

• Inventory of configuration options used in Tempo
• Inventory of configuration options used in tempo-distributed Helm chart
• Inventory of the examples that require updating for Helm chart usage
• Prioritize the examples to update and create a list
• Update the most important ones first