Jaeger is a distributed tracing platform created by Uber Technologies and donated to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, where it achieved graduated status as a top-level project in October 2019. Written primarily in Go, the system enables developers to monitor and troubleshoot microservices architectures by collecting, visualizing, and analyzing trace data across distributed systems. The platform addresses core observability challenges including latency tracking, service dependency analysis, performance bottleneck detection, and span data collection in complex service-oriented environments.
The repository represents the core backend and infrastructure of the Jaeger ecosystem.
Jaeger v2 represents a major release milestone documented in the repository, with the README directing users to updated getting started guides and blog posts explaining the new version's capabilities. The platform integrates closely with the OpenTelemetry Collector, maintaining configuration compatibility across releases while establishing clear deprecation policies that provide at least three months or two minor version bumps before removing deprecated configuration options. The project tracks Go version compatibility with the currently supported Go releases, removing support for unsupported versions as new minor releases arrive, with all importable code moved to internal packages to eliminate backward compatibility constraints with older compilers.
The Jaeger ecosystem extends beyond this core repository through related components including the jaeger-ui for trace visualization and jaeger-idl for data model definitions, with comprehensive documentation maintained separately. The project operates under open governance with regular maintainer and contributor meetings open to the community, published roadmaps, and multiple communication channels including Slack, mailing lists, GitHub issues, and discussions.
The platform supports diverse adoption patterns, from organizations using only instrumentation libraries to those running complete end-to-end Jaeger installations in production environments, with an adopters list maintained to recognize organizations leveraging the system.
