Jaeger

Grafana Labs Teams Use Jaeger to Improve Query Performance Up to 10x

Jaeger and OpenTelemetry

Recently, OpenTelemetry has been announced as a new CNCF sandbox project resulting from a merger of OpenTracing and OpenCensus [1], [2], [3], [4]. Several people have already asked me what OpenTelemetry means for the Jaeger project (incubating at CNCF), and whether it is going to replace Jaeger. I will attempt to answer these questions in this post.

Jaeger integration in Kiali

Kiali has the ability to show traces obtained from Istio. Jaeger collects traces for monitoring and troubleshooting microservices-based distributed systems, and both Istio and Kiali use the data that Jaeger provides. Originally this was done via a separate tab in the UI.

Help! Something is wrong with my Jaeger installation!

Jaeger is composed of different components, each potentially running in its own host. It might be the case that one of these moving parts isn’t working properly, causing spans to not be processed and stored. When something goes wrong, make sure to check the items listed here.

Open for event based tracing?

In OpenTracing the fundamental concept for representing distributed traces is the (time) span: something that starts and then finishes, can be annotated with key-value pairs and can be “causally” related. This representation gained popularity with Google’s Dapper paper and triggered open-source tracing implementations like Zipkin and Jaeger and eventually the OpenTracing specification, but according to the academic literature it is not the only one. In spite its popularity, the span based trace representation has some shortcomings that limit its applicability.

Deployment strategies for the Jaeger Agent

If you’ve been following the evolution of the Kubernetes templates for Jaeger, you might have noticed an important change recently: the Jaeger Agent is not being deployed as a DaemonSet anymore. Instead, instructions are now being provided on how to deploy it as a “Sidecar”. The Agent component was developed to act as a “buffer” between the tracer and the collector.