Jaeger Has a Free Distributed Tracing Platform — Debug Microservices Performance Issues

Jaeger is a CNCF graduated distributed tracing platform for monitoring microservice architectures.

What You Get for Free

• Distributed tracing — follow requests across services
• Trace visualization — timeline view of all spans
• Service dependencies — automatic service map
• Root cause analysis — identify slow services/queries
• OpenTelemetry — native OTel support
• Multiple storage — Cassandra, Elasticsearch, Kafka, Badger, ClickHouse
• Adaptive sampling — control trace volume intelligently
• Compare traces — side-by-side trace comparison
• Hotrod demo — example app for learning
• CNCF graduated — production-ready

Quick Start

# All-in-one (development)
docker run -d -p 16686:16686 -p 4318:4318 \
  jaegertracing/jaeger:latest

# Access UI at http://localhost:16686
# Send traces via OpenTelemetry SDK to port 4318

Why Teams Choose It

Debugging microservices without tracing is guessing:

• CNCF graduated — same trust as Kubernetes, Prometheus
• OpenTelemetry native — use standard OTel SDKs
• Free — no per-trace pricing like Datadog
• Proven at scale — used by Uber (creators), Red Hat, and others

A team with 30 microservices had a "mystery slow request" — 5-second response time but each service logged 100ms. Jaeger revealed a 4-second gap between service C and D — a DNS resolution timeout that no service logs showed.

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