Jaeger

Jaeger Skill

Open source, end-to-end distributed tracing.

Ecosystem Graph

graph LR
  jaeger["Jaeger"]
  jaeger -- "depends on" --> opentelemetry
  jaeger -- "integrates with" --> grafana

Quick Start

Jaeger receives distributed traces (usually from OpenTelemetry), stores them, and provides a UI to visualize the exact lifecycle of a request as it hops across multiple microservices.

docker run -d -p 16686:16686 -p 4317:4317 jaegertracing/all-in-one:latest

Production Patterns

Trace Sampling

Do not trace 100% of your requests in production. Use probabilistic sampling (e.g., 1%) or tail-based sampling (recording 100% of errors but only 1% of successful requests) to prevent Jaeger's storage backend from imploding.

Architecture & Scaling

Storage Backends

The all-in-one Docker image uses in-memory storage and will lose data upon restart. For production, you must configure Jaeger to use a durable storage backend like Elasticsearch or Cassandra.

Error Recovery

If the Jaeger UI is incredibly slow, it is likely due to the underlying Elasticsearch database struggling to aggregate massive trace volumes. Optimize your ES cluster and ensure you are aggressively rotating old indices.

Security Notes

Jaeger's UI has no built-in authentication mechanism. When deploying to Kubernetes, place it behind an OAuth2 Proxy or an Ingress controller configured with strict IP whitelisting.

Relationships

Prerequisites: opentelemetry

Works Well With: grafana

References

• Jaeger Docs

Why use this skill

Use this when your agent works with jaeger — structured patterns beat pasted docs and prevent common hallucinations.

AI pitfalls

• Using outdated SDK or API versions from training data
• Inventing environment variable names
• Omitting error handling and retry logic

Production checklist

• Secrets in environment variables, not source code
• Error handling and logging in place
• Rate limits and timeouts configured

Related skills

• opentelemetry — depends on
• grafana — integrates with

Last Verified: 2026-07-02