From my POV, the most pressing issue is the CLI structure. Having some kind of command-based structure (like in Logcli) would make the tool easier to extend and use.

Example:

$ tempo-cli query <args>

Yup, this has come up in internal discussions a few times. It's just not something anyone has had time to spend on.

What kind of structure are we talking about? What capabilities (aka actions) we want to explicitly provide?

Currently tempo-cli only does two things:

• dump all the blocks in your gcs/s3 backend with some basic stats
• query the /api/traces endpoint and dump the json

So I suppose it would be nice to make those the two subcommands:

./tempo-cli dump-blocks
./tempo-cli query