Jaeger is a free, open-source platform for tracing requests across complex distributed systems. It helps teams locate performance bottlenecks, investigate root causes, and understand how services depend on one another. Jaeger can receive traces using the OpenTelemetry Protocol and can accept Zipkin spans over HTTP in Thrift, JSON v1/v2, and Protobuf formats. Its interface includes System Architecture and Deep Dependency Graph service views; Service Performance Monitoring derives aggregate metrics from traces and displays them as time-series charts. Sampling options include head-based sampling with centralized static or adaptive settings, as well as tail-based sampling. Supported distributed storage backends are Cassandra, Elasticsearch, and OpenSearch; ClickHouse is experimental behind a feature gate. Jaeger documents TLS and mutual TLS for several component connections, plus bearer-token authentication between browser and UI. Jaeger v2 is available as executable binaries and container images. Its all-in-one setup runs collector and query components in one process with temporary in-memory storage. It is self-hosted, so storage capacity and scale depend on the chosen infrastructure. Jaeger v1 reached end of life on December 31, 2025 and no longer receives updates.
Who it is for
Jaeger suits teams operating distributed systems who need to investigate traces, service dependencies, and performance. It requires self-hosted deployment, with storage and scale dependent on the selected infrastructure.
What is good
- Receives OpenTelemetry and Zipkin trace data
- Offers service dependency graphs
- Supports both head-based and tail-based sampling
- Free and open source
What to know first
- Self-hosted storage and scale depend on infrastructure
- ClickHouse support is experimental
- Jaeger v1 no longer receives updates
Verdict
Jaeger provides distributed tracing, service graphs, and trace-derived performance metrics as a self-hosted open-source project. Choose the v2 release path with its available binaries or containers; v1 has reached end of life.
Jaeger plans and pricing
All plansCompared on application performance monitoring
- Free plan
- Yes
- Distributed tracing
- Yes
- Transaction tracing
- Yes
- Dependency mapping
- Yes
- Real user monitoring
- No
- Deployment model
- self_hosted
