Jaeger - a Distributed Tracing System
Jaeger, inspired by Dapper and OpenZipkin, is a distributed tracing system released as open source by Uber Technologies. It can be used for monitoring microservices-based distributed systems:
- Distributed context propagation
- Distributed transaction monitoring
- Root cause analysis
- Service dependency analysis
- Performance / latency optimization
See also:
- Jaeger documentation for getting started, operational details, and other information.
- Blog post Evolving Distributed Tracing at Uber.
- Tutorial / walkthrough Take OpenTracing for a HotROD ride.
Jaeger is hosted by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) as the 7th top-level project (graduated in October 2019). If you are a company that wants to help shape the evolution of technologies that are container-packaged, dynamically-scheduled and microservices-oriented, consider joining the CNCF. For details about who's involved and how Jaeger plays a role, read the CNCF Jaeger incubation announcement and Jaeger graduation announcement.
Features
High Scalability
Jaeger backend is designed to have no single points of failure and to scale with the business needs. For example, any given Jaeger installation at Uber is typically processing several billions of spans per day.
Native support for OpenTracing
Jaeger backend, Web UI, and instrumentation libraries have been designed from ground up to support the OpenTracing standard.
- Represent traces as directed acyclic graphs (not just trees) via span references
- Support strongly typed span tags and structured logs
- Support general distributed context propagation mechanism via baggage
OpenTelemetry
On 28-May-2019, the OpenTracing and OpenCensus projects announced their intention to merge into a new CNCF project called OpenTelemetry. The Jaeger and OpenTelemetry projects have different goals. OpenTelemetry aims to provide APIs and SDKs in multiple languages to allow applications export various telemetry data out of process, to any number of metrics and tracing backends. The Jaeger project is primarily the tracing backend that receives tracing telemetry data and provides processing, aggregation, data mining, and visualizations of that data. The Jaeger client libraries do overlap with OpenTelemetry in functionality. OpenTelemetry will natively support Jaeger as a tracing backend, and eventually might make Jaeger native clients unnecessary. For more information please refer to a blog post Jaeger and OpenTelemetry.
Multiple storage backends
Jaeger supports two popular open source NoSQL databases as trace storage backends: Cassandra 3.4+ and Elasticsearch 5.x/6.x. There is also embedded database support using Badger. There are ongoing community experiments using other databases, such as ScyllaDB, InfluxDB, Amazon DynamoDB. Jaeger also ships with a simple in-memory storage for testing setups.
Modern Web UI
Jaeger Web UI is implemented in Javascript using popular open source frameworks like React. Several performance improvements have been released in v1.0 to allow the UI to efficiently deal with large volumes of data, and to display traces with tens of thousands of spans (e.g. we tried a trace with 80,000 spans).
Cloud Native Deployment
Jaeger backend is distributed as a collection of Docker images. The binaries support various configuration methods, including command line options, environment variables, and configuration files in multiple formats (yaml, toml, etc.) Deployment to Kubernetes clusters is assisted by Kubernetes templates and a Helm chart.
Observability
All Jaeger backend components expose Prometheus metrics by default (other metrics backends are also supported). Logs are written to standard out using the structured logging library zap.
Security
Third-party security audits of Jaeger are available in https://github.com/jaegertracing/security-audits. Please see Issue #1718 for the summary of available security mechanisms in Jaeger.
Backwards compatibility with Zipkin
Although we recommend instrumenting applications with OpenTracing API and binding to Jaeger client libraries to benefit from advanced features not available elsewhere, if your organization has already invested in the instrumentation using Zipkin libraries, you do not have to rewrite all that code. Jaeger provides backwards compatibility with Zipkin by accepting spans in Zipkin formats (Thrift or JSON v1/v2) over HTTP. Switching from Zipkin backend is just a matter of routing the traffic from Zipkin libraries to the Jaeger backend.
Related Repositories
Documentation
- Published: https://www.jaegertracing.io/docs/
- Source: https://github.com/jaegertracing/documentation
Instrumentation Libraries
Deployment
Components
Building From Source
See CONTRIBUTING.
Contributing
See CONTRIBUTING.
Maintainers
Below are the official maintainers of the Jaeger project. Please use @jaegertracing/jaeger-maintainers to tag them on issues / PRs.
Some repositories under jaegertracing org have additional maintainers.
Project Status Bi-Weekly Meeting
The Jaeger contributors meet bi-weekly, and everyone is welcome to join. Agenda and meeting details here.
Roadmap
See https://www.jaegertracing.io/docs/roadmap/
Questions, Discussions, Bug Reports
Reach project contributors via these channels:
Adopters
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.