Jaeger
February 22, 2026
What it is
Jaeger provides distributed tracing: track requests across services, see latency and dependencies. OpenTelemetry-compatible; CNCF project.
Usage
Instrument apps (OpenTelemetry or Jaeger clients); send traces; query by service, operation, or tag; find bottlenecks and errors.
Pros and cons
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| OpenTelemetry compatible | Requires instrumentation |
| UI for trace search | Storage and sampling design needed |
| CNCF graduated | |
| Multi-backend (Cassandra, ES, etc.) |
Alternatives
Tempo (Grafana), Zipkin. Why Jaeger: Mature, OTel-native, and flexible storage.
Links
- Homepage: https://www.jaegertracing.io/
- Documentation: https://www.jaegertracing.io/docs/
- Source: https://github.com/jaegertracing/jaeger