Company Overview
Jaeger is an open-source end-to-end distributed tracing system created by Yuri Shkuro at Uber in 2015, open-sourced in 2017, and became a CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation) graduated project in 2019. Designed for microservice architectures, Jaeger helps engineering teams trace requests across distributed services, quickly identifying performance bottlenecks and root causes of failures.
As a CNCF graduated project, Jaeger has a mature open-source ecosystem and a large global user base.
Core Products
| Product | Description |
|---|---|
| Jaeger (Tracing Backend) | Core distributed tracing backend for receiving, storing, and querying trace data |
| Jaeger UI | Visual user interface for searching traces, viewing call chains, and analyzing latency |
| Jaeger Collector | Collector component for receiving, validating, and indexing Span data from clients |
| Jaeger Query | Query service providing API endpoints and UI backend for trace data retrieval and analysis |
| Jaeger Agent | Daemon agent deployed on hosts to collect Spans from clients and batch-send to Collector |
| Jaeger Operator | Kubernetes Operator for simplified deployment and management of Jaeger on K8s clusters |
Technical Strengths
- End-to-End Tracing: Complete call-chain tracing for distributed requests, enabling rapid fault localization
- CNCF Graduated Project: Top-tier cloud-native open-source project with mature ecosystem and community support
- OpenTelemetry Compatible: Native support for OpenTelemetry protocol, seamlessly integrating with cloud-native observability stacks
- High-Performance Storage: Supports multiple backend storage options including Cassandra, Elasticsearch, and Kafka
- Multi-Language SDK: Provides client libraries for Java, Go, Python, Node.js, C++, and more
- Scalable Architecture: Modular design supporting horizontal scaling for large-scale production environments
Key Milestones
| Year | Milestone |
|---|---|
| 2015 | Yuri Shkuro created Jaeger at Uber |
| 2017 | Jaeger was officially open-sourced |
| 2018 | Joined CNCF as an incubation project |
| 2019 | Became a CNCF graduated project |
| 2021 | Completed native integration with OpenTelemetry protocol |
| 2026 | Continues evolving, widely used in global microservice tracing |
Competitive Landscape
Jaeger is one of the most influential open-source solutions in the distributed tracing space. Key competitors include:
| Competitor | Positioning |
|---|---|
| Zipkin | Open-source distributed tracing system, open-sourced by Twitter |
| Datadog APM | Commercial APM platform with comprehensive distributed tracing |
| New Relic Distributed Tracing | Commercial observability platform tracing solution |
| Honeycomb | Event-driven observability platform for complex systems |
| Lightstep | High-precision commercial distributed tracing platform |