diff --git a/CHANGELOG.md b/CHANGELOG.md
index 8c9f63db406..a695ae53152 100644
--- a/CHANGELOG.md
+++ b/CHANGELOG.md
@@ -22,6 +22,7 @@
 * [ENHANCEMENT] Add caching to query range queries [#3796](https://github.com/grafana/tempo/pull/3796) (@mapno)
 * [ENHANCEMENT] Add data quality metric to measure traces without a root [#3812](https://github.com/grafana/tempo/pull/3812) (@mapno)
 * [ENHANCEMENT] Add a new helper method to allow debugging e2e tests [#3836](https://github.com/grafana/tempo/pull/3836) (@javiermolinar)
+* [BUGFIX] Fix panic in certain metrics queries using `rate()` with `by` [#3847](https://github.com/grafana/tempo/pull/3847) (@stoewer)
 * [BUGFIX] Fix metrics queries when grouping by attributes that may not exist [#3734](https://github.com/grafana/tempo/pull/3734) (@mdisibio)
 * [BUGFIX] Fix frontend parsing error on cached responses [#3759](https://github.com/grafana/tempo/pull/3759) (@mdisibio)
 * [BUGFIX] max_global_traces_per_user: take into account ingestion.tenant_shard_size when converting to local limit [#3618](https://github.com/grafana/tempo/pull/3618) (@kvrhdn)
diff --git a/tempodb/encoding/vparquet4/block_traceql.go b/tempodb/encoding/vparquet4/block_traceql.go
index d25241e15a9..f2587930a4c 100644
--- a/tempodb/encoding/vparquet4/block_traceql.go
+++ b/tempodb/encoding/vparquet4/block_traceql.go
@@ -2704,7 +2704,10 @@ func (c *batchCollector) KeepGroup(res *parquetquery.IteratorResult) bool {
 	// Second pass. Update and further filter the spans
 	spans = res.OtherEntries[:0]
 	for _, e := range res.OtherEntries {
-		span := e.Value.(*span)
+		span, ok := e.Value.(*span)
+		if !ok {
+			continue
+		}
 
 		// Copy resource-level attributes to the span
 		// If the span already has an entry for this attribute it