Jaeger is a CNCF-graduated distributed tracing platform that captures and visualizes the flow of requests through microservice architectures. Originally developed at Uber Technologies to debug their complex backend systems, Jaeger has become the most widely adopted open-source tracing solution alongside Zipkin. It collects trace data showing how individual requests propagate through services, databases, message queues, and external APIs, enabling teams to identify exactly where latency, errors, and bottlenecks occur in distributed systems.
The platform supports OpenTelemetry as its primary instrumentation standard, allowing developers to instrument their applications with vendor-neutral SDKs across dozens of programming languages. Jaeger processes trace data through a collector that writes to configurable storage backends including Cassandra for high-volume production workloads, Elasticsearch for flexible querying and integration with the ELK stack, and Kafka for buffering in high-throughput environments. The web-based UI provides trace search, service dependency visualization, and detailed span-level analysis.
Deployment ranges from a single all-in-one Docker container for development to fully distributed Kubernetes deployments with separate collector, query, and ingester components for production scale. Jaeger integrates natively with Grafana for dashboard visualization, Prometheus for metrics correlation, and can complement Sentry or Datadog for error tracking and infrastructure monitoring. As a CNCF graduated project alongside Kubernetes and Prometheus, Jaeger benefits from strong community governance and long-term maintenance commitment.