Jaeger
Created by Uber Technologies and graduated as the seventh CNCF top-level project in October 2019 with over 23,000 GitHub stars, Jaeger has become one of the most widely deployed open-source distributed tracing platforms, processing billions of spans per day in production environments at organizations including Uber, Red Hat, and Shopify. Version 2 rebuilt the platform on the OpenTelemetry Collector framework, inheriting its extensible pipeline architecture while implementing Jaeger-specific features as extensions and components, enabling seamless integration with the OpenTelemetry ecosystem through native OTLP protocol support. The platform stores traces in Cassandra 4.0+, Elasticsearch 7.x/8.x, OpenSearch 1.0+, ClickHouse, or the embedded Badger database for development setups. Three sampling strategies control trace volume: head-based sampling with constant, probabilistic, and rate-limiting modes, tail-based sampling using the OpenTelemetry Collector processor that evaluates complete traces before storage decisions, and adaptive sampling that dynamically adjusts probabilities based on observed traffic patterns. Service Performance Monitoring computes RED metrics directly from spans, displaying request rates, error rates, and latency percentiles in the Monitor tab with drill-down from aggregate service views to individual traces. The web UI provides trace search with multi-field filtering, trace detail views with span timeline visualization, trace comparison across services, and dependency graphs mapping service relationships from actual traffic. Deployment options range from a single all-in-one binary for development to distributed collector-ingester-query configurations with Kafka intermediate buffering for production scale. Running on a dedicated VPS on RepoCloud with guaranteed CPU, RAM, and SSD, full root SSH access, and a browser serial console. Apache 2.0 licensed.
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