Jaeger is the CNCF-graduated distributed tracing system built at Uber, used for debugging latency in microservices at Red Hat, IBM, and teams running Kubernetes at scale.
Source: GitHub · fetched 2026-04-17
Jaeger is a distributed tracing system released in 2015 by Uber and donated to the CNCF, where it is a graduated project. It is Apache 2.0 licensed. Jaeger ingests trace data—typically via OpenTelemetry now, historically via its own client libraries—and provides a UI for inspecting request flow, spans, tags, and latency across microservices.
Jaeger v2, announced in 2024, is built on the OpenTelemetry Collector, which consolidates the ecosystem and makes OTel the primary instrumentation path. Backends for span storage include Cassandra, Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, and Kafka. Many teams now run Jaeger purely as a UI in front of other storage backends, while some have migrated to Grafana Tempo for tighter integration with the LGTM stack.
Production Jaeger deployments include Uber (where it originated), Red Hat, IBM, Symantec, and most CNCF-adjacent engineering orgs that adopted distributed tracing before Tempo existed. Red Hat OpenShift Distributed Tracing ships Jaeger as the default backend, which gives it transitive reach across OpenShift customers.
Jaeger users are backend engineers debugging latency in microservices, SREs investigating incidents that span services, platform engineers maintaining the trace pipeline, and performance engineers chasing p99 regressions. These personas buy APM, observability platforms, profiling tools, and metric stores.
According to the Jaeger README: “Jaeger is a distributed tracing platform created by Uber Technologies and donated to Cloud Native Computing Foundation.” (source)
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Jaeger is used in production at Uber (creator), HotRod logistics, Red Hat, and observability teams instrumenting microservices for end-to-end distributed tracing across cloud-native architectures.
Jaeger is a CNCF graduated project, originally created by Uber Technologies and donated to the CNCF in 2017. The project is maintained by the jaegertracing GitHub organization with contributions from many companies.
Zipkin (the other classic distributed tracing system), Tempo (Grafana, OpenTelemetry-native), SigNoz, AWS X-Ray, Datadog APM, and Honeycomb. OpenTelemetry is the data collection standard that feeds into most of these backends.
Jaeger has 470 contributors (GitHub, 2026/04). It is one of the more actively contributed open-source projects in its category, with contributions from both individual developers and corporate engineering teams.
Yes. Jaeger is production-ready: it has 22.7k GitHub stars, 470 contributors (GitHub, 2026/04), and is last released Mar 2026. It is used in production at large-scale organizations and has a mature release cadence.
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