AWS X-Ray
Trace requests through distributed and serverless apps on AWS.
Jaeger
End‑to‑end distributed tracing for cloud‑native applications at scale
Jaeger, a CNCF‑graduated platform, collects, stores, and visualizes trace data, integrates with OpenTelemetry and supports storage backends.
Overview
Overview
Jaeger is a CNCF‑graduated distributed tracing system designed for developers and operators of microservice architectures. It ingests trace spans from applications instrumented with the OpenTelemetry SDK, providing end‑to‑end visibility into request flows.
Capabilities
The platform consists of a collector that receives data over HTTP or gRPC, a pluggable storage layer supporting backends such as Elasticsearch and Cassandra, a query service for fast retrieval, and a web UI for interactive analysis. Jaeger offers version‑compatibility guarantees and aligns with Go release cycles, making upgrades predictable. Deployments can run on Kubernetes, Docker, or as standalone binaries, fitting both production and development environments.
Community & Support
As a graduated CNCF project, Jaeger benefits from a vibrant community, regular status meetings, and extensive documentation. Users can contribute via Slack, mailing lists, or GitHub, and the project maintains clear deprecation policies to ensure stability.
Highlights
Native OpenTelemetry SDK integration via HTTP/gRPC
Pluggable storage architecture with multiple backend options
Scalable collector and query services for high‑volume traces
Web UI for real‑time trace visualization and analysis
Pros
- CNCF graduated project with strong community backing
- Configuration compatibility guarantees reduce upgrade friction
- Written in Go, leveraging performance and ecosystem tools
- Flexible deployment models: Kubernetes, Docker, or binary
Considerations
- Requires separate storage backend configuration
- Advanced features may need custom plugins or extensions
- Full end‑to‑end setup has a learning curve
- UI lacks built‑in enterprise reporting dashboards
Managed products teams compare with
When teams consider Jaeger, these hosted platforms usually appear on the same shortlist.
Looking for a hosted option? These are the services engineering teams benchmark against before choosing open source.
Fit guide
Great for
- Teams building microservice architectures needing latency insights
- Organizations adopting OpenTelemetry for observability pipelines
- Operators preferring cloud‑native, CNCF‑backed tooling
- Developers troubleshooting performance issues in staging or production
Not ideal when
- Small monolithic applications where lightweight tracing suffices
- Environments without Go runtime support for custom plugins
- Teams requiring commercial SLA guarantees out‑of‑the‑box
- Users needing pre‑built business‑metric dashboards
How teams use it
Root‑cause latency analysis
Correlate spans across services to pinpoint slow operations and reduce request latency.
Service dependency mapping
Generate visual service graphs to understand call relationships and detect unexpected dependencies.
Performance regression detection
Compare trace data across releases to identify new bottlenecks before they impact users.
Kubernetes pod tracing
Collect traces from pods via sidecar or SDK, storing them in a centralized Jaeger backend for cluster‑wide visibility.
Tech snapshot
Go94%
Shell2%
Python2%
Makefile1%
Jsonnet1%
Dockerfile1%
Frequently asked questions
How does Jaeger integrate with OpenTelemetry?
Jaeger’s collector accepts trace data from the OpenTelemetry SDK over HTTP or gRPC, allowing seamless ingestion without code changes.
What storage options are supported?
Jaeger supports multiple backends such as Elasticsearch, Cassandra, Kafka, and BadgerDB via pluggable storage plugins.
Is Jaeger suitable for production workloads?
Yes; it is a CNCF‑graduated project with scalability features, version compatibility guarantees, and active community support.
How are configuration deprecations handled?
Deprecations are announced with a three‑month grace period or two minor releases before removal, giving users time to migrate.
Can Jaeger be deployed on Kubernetes?
Jaeger provides Helm charts and operator support for easy deployment and management on Kubernetes clusters.
Project at a glance
Active- Stars
- 22,373
- Watchers
- 22,373
- Forks
- 2,742
LicenseApache-2.0
Repo age9 years old
Last commit14 hours ago
Primary languageGo
Last synced 4 hours ago