🧭Jaeger

NEW

An open-source, end-to-end distributed tracing system for monitoring, visualizing, and troubleshooting microservices performance.

DESCRIPTION

Jaeger is a CNCF project that implements distributed tracing to analyze request flows across microservices. It provides trace collection, storage, visualization, and analysis with sampling strategies. Engineers use Jaeger to identify latency bottlenecks, understand service dependencies, and validate performance optimizations. It integrates with OpenTelemetry and supports multiple backends. Typical deployments include collectors, agents, storage (e.g., Elasticsearch), and a query UI.

ALTERNATIVE DEFINITIONS

Jaeger

Jaeger is an open source, end-to-end distributed tracing.

Highlights open source and end-to-end scope succinctly.

Source

Cloud Native Computing Foundation

Jaeger is a distributed tracing platform.

Emphasizes platform-level role under CNCF governance.

Source

RELATED TERMS

Tracing OpenTelemetry OpenTracing Prometheus Microservices Service Mesh W3C Trace Context

COMPETING TERMS

Zipkin Grafana Tempo AWS X-Ray

RELATIONS

• Conforms to: OpenTelemetry OpenTracing

KNOWLEDGE AREAS

Observability & Telemetry Software Engineering Platform & Tooling Cloud

TARGET AUDIENCE

DevOps Engineer Software Developer Cloud Architect Solution Architect MLOps Engineer IT Manager

EXTERNAL SOURCES

• Wikipedia - Jaeger (software)
• Jaeger - Official Jaeger documentation
• Cloud Native Computing Foundation - CNCF project overview
• OpenTelemetry - Collector Jaeger receiver
• Grafana - Tempo overview and Jaeger compatibility

TOP QUESTIONS

Why use Jaeger for distributed tracing?

Jaeger makes it easier to diagnose latency and errors across microservices by visualizing end-to-end request paths. It provides powerful analysis of spans and service dependencies.

Category: Relevancy

How does Jaeger collect traces?

Applications emit spans via SDKs or OpenTelemetry, which are sent to Jaeger agents or collectors for batching, processing, and storage. The UI then queries and visualizes traces.

Category: How-to

What storage backends does Jaeger support?

Jaeger commonly uses Elasticsearch, Cassandra, or Kafka pipelines for storage and streaming. Storage choice influences scale, retention, and query performance.

Category: Requirements

How does sampling work in Jaeger?

Jaeger supports various sampling strategies like probabilistic, rate-limiting, and remote sampling. Sampling controls data volume while preserving diagnostic value.

Category: Management

What is a common mistake when deploying Jaeger?

Instrumenting too few services leads to fragmented traces. Another mistake is not aligning sampling configuration with SLOs, causing missing data during incidents.

Category: Mistakes

How does Jaeger relate to OpenTelemetry?

OpenTelemetry provides vendor-neutral instrumentation, and Jaeger can receive and visualize those traces. Many teams migrate from legacy OpenTracing to OpenTelemetry with Jaeger.

Category: Example

What are Jaeger’s main competitors?

Zipkin and Grafana Tempo are open-source alternatives, while AWS X-Ray is a managed service. Choice depends on ecosystem fit and operational preferences.

Category: Alternatives

What risks arise from misconfigured Jaeger?

Excessively high sampling can inflate costs and latency; too low sampling may hide critical issues. Poor retention policies can impair incident forensics.

Category: Risks

How do I start with Jaeger?

Begin by instrumenting a single request path with OpenTelemetry SDKs, deploy a minimal all-in-one Jaeger, then scale to production-grade collectors and storage.

Category: How-to