Jaeger is a distributed tracing platform designed to help developers and organizations monitor and troubleshoot complex microservices-based applications. As an open-source tool maintained under the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), Jaeger provides end-to-end visibility into request flows across services, enabling teams to identify bottlenecks, errors, and performance issues.
Key Features:
Open Source: Built on community contributions and governed by CNCF, ensuring transparency and collaboration.
Scalable Architecture: Supports large-scale deployments with high availability and fault tolerance.
Integration with OpenTelemetry: Seamlessly works with the OpenTelemetry ecosystem for modern observability practices.
Storage Plugins: Flexible support for various storage backends, including Elasticsearch, Prometheus, and more.
User-Friendly UI: Provides a web interface for querying traces, visualizing data, and analyzing performance metrics.
Audience & Benefit:
Ideal for developers, DevOps engineers, and cloud-native teams seeking to optimize application performance and reliability. Jaeger helps organizations quickly diagnose issues in distributed systems, improve debugging efficiency, and ensure consistent service quality across microservices architectures.
Jaeger is an open source project with open governance. We welcome contributions from the community, and we would love your help to improve and extend the project. Here are some ideas for how to get involved. Many of them do not even require any coding.
Version Compatibility Guarantees
Since Jaeger uses many components from the OpenTelemetry Collector we try to maintain configuration compatibility between Jaeger releases. Occasionally, configuration options in Jaeger (or in Jaeger v1 CLI flags) can be deprecated due to usability improvements, new functionality, or changes in our dependencies.
In such situations, developers introducing the deprecation are required to follow these guidelines.
In short, for a deprecated configuration option, you should expect to see the following message in the documentation or release notes:
(deprecated, will be removed after yyyy-mm-dd or in release vX.Y.Z, whichever is later)
A grace period of at least 3 months or two minor version bumps (whichever is later) from the first release
containing the deprecation notice will be provided before the deprecated configuration option can be deleted.
For example, consider a scenario where v2.0.0 is released on 01-Sep-2024 containing a deprecation notice for a configuration option.
This configuration option will remain in a deprecated state until the later of 01-Dec-2024 or v2.2.0 where it can be removed on or after either of those events.
It may remain deprecated for longer than the aforementioned grace period.
Go Version Compatibility Guarantees
The Jaeger project attempts to track the currently supported versions of Go, as defined by the Go team.
Removing support for an unsupported Go version is not considered a breaking change.
Starting with the release of Go 1.21, support for Go versions will be updated as follows:
Soon after the release of a new Go minor version N, updates will be made to the build and tests steps to accommodate the latest Go minor version.
Soon after the release of a new Go minor version N, support for Go version N-2 will be removed and version N-1 will become the minimum required version.
Rules for becoming a maintainer are defined in the GOVERNANCE document.
The official maintainers of the Jaeger project are listed in the MAINTAINERS file.
Please use @jaegertracing/jaeger-maintainers to tag them on issues / PRs.
Some repositories under jaegertracing org have additional maintainers.
Project Status Meetings
The Jaeger maintainers and contributors meet regularly on a video call. Everyone is welcome to join, including end users. For meeting details, see https://www.jaegertracing.io/get-in-touch/.
Jaeger as a product consists of multiple components. We want to support different types of users,
whether they are only using our instrumentation libraries or full end to end Jaeger installation,
whether it runs in production or you use it to troubleshoot issues in development.
Please see ADOPTERS.md for some of the organizations using Jaeger today.
If you would like to add your organization to the list, please comment on our
survey issue.
Sponsors
The Jaeger project owes its success in open source largely to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), our primary supporter. We deeply appreciate their vital support. Furthermore, we are grateful to Uber for their initial, project-launching donation, and for the continuous contributions of software and infrastructure from 1Password, Codecov.io, Dosu, GitHub, Google Analytics, Netlify, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Thank you for your generous support.
