Jaeger

Judgement

What it is

Complete system

What it does

A CNCF distributed tracing platform that collects, stores and visualises OpenTelemetry traces across microservices.

Adopt it when

You need self-hosted tracing to follow requests through services and find latency problems.

Watch out

Tracing only; you still need separate tools for metrics and logs, and storage needs planning.

Ready for

Production-ready

Runs as

Self-hosted server

Built with

Go, OpenTelemetry, Elasticsearch and Cassandra

How established

Established: started 10 years ago, latest release v2.22.0.

What the license allows

You can build it into a product you sell, as long as you keep its copyright notice.

Judged on 2026-11-03 from the project's README and GitHub data. The license and age lines are worked out directly.

Built from

Follow it down: Jaeger → Go → runs on a microchip

How compilers were built, back to punched paper tape

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