description Jaeger Overview
Following a request across separate services is the job of Jaeger, an open-source distributed tracing system. It collects traces made up of spans, with each span describing a timed operation in an instrumented application. Those records help developers see how service interactions contribute to the total time taken by a request, including where work waits or fails. This makes Jaeger useful to development and operations teams managing complex cloud-native applications, particularly when a slow response cannot be explained by looking at one service alone.
Traces can reveal dependencies and provide context for performance troubleshooting, but the application must supply appropriate tracing data. Within observability tools, its distinction is the view of individual request journeys across service boundaries. Despite the assigned category, it tracks application operations rather than employee hours or project timesheets.
help Jaeger FAQ
Is Jaeger a time-tracking app for personal productivity?
No, Jaeger is a distributed tracing system for software services, not a personal timesheet tool. It records traces and spans so engineers can see where requests spend time across microservices.
What problem did Uber build Jaeger to solve?
Jaeger was originally built at Uber to trace requests across large microservice architectures. It became a Cloud Native Computing Foundation project and is commonly used with OpenTelemetry instrumentation.
How does Jaeger help find a slow checkout or API request?
Jaeger can show one request broken into spans, such as gateway, auth service, inventory service, and database call. If a PostgreSQL query takes 900 ms inside a 1.2 second trace, the slow section is visible instead of hidden in logs.
What are common Jaeger alternatives in observability stacks?
Common alternatives include Zipkin, Grafana Tempo, Honeycomb, Datadog APM, and New Relic. Jaeger is attractive when teams want an open-source tracing backend and already use Kubernetes or OpenTelemetry.
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