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Aug 21, 2026 · Operations

Scaling Link Tracing Storage: From Centralized Elasticsearch to Tiered Architecture

The article analyzes why storing massive tracing spans in a single Elasticsearch cluster fails at high QPS, outlines the four key challenges of trace data, and presents a three‑step engineering solution—sampling, hot‑warm‑cold tiered storage, and separating indexes from span payloads—while comparing major back‑ends such as Elasticsearch, Cassandra, ClickHouse, and Tempo.