Jaeger
Jaeger is an open source distributed tracing backend and UI, originally from Uber and now a CNCF graduated project. It accepts OpenTelemetry trace exports for request-flow debugging. We assess it for OSS trace storage; many teams also view traces in Grafana Tempo instead.
Blurb
Jaeger is an open-source end-to-end distributed tracing platform.
Summary
What it is: Collectors, storage (Cassandra, Elasticsearch, Badger, etc.), query service, and Jaeger UI for trace search.
When to use: Need self-hosted tracing without Tempo; existing Jaeger instrumentation or OTel pipelines.
When to skip: Grafana-all-in-one stack already standardized on Tempo. SaaS trace analytics (Honeycomb, Datadog).
Key features: Service dependency graphs, adaptive sampling, OTLP ingest, operator deployment on Kubernetes.
Details
| Topic | Notes |
|---|---|
| Pairing | Instrument with OpenTelemetry SDKs; export OTLP to Jaeger collectors |
| Storage | Plan retention and index backend cost for high-QPS services |
References