Jaeger
CNCF distributed tracing platform
The Lens
By Erik Loyd, SaaS CEO and former COO/CFO of an AWS Premier Partner.
Updated Mar 2026
It's a distributed tracing platform: it tracks requests as they flow through your services, showing you exactly where time is spent. Service A calls Service B calls Service C, and Jaeger draws the full timeline.
CNCF graduated project, originally built by Uber. It collects traces from your services, stores them, and gives you a UI to search and visualize request flows. Supports OpenTelemetry natively, which means you instrument your code once and can switch tracing backends later.
Apache 2.0. Fully free, no paid tier.
The catch: running Jaeger in production is real ops work. You need a storage backend (Elasticsearch, Cassandra, or Kafka), and those have their own operational costs. The UI is functional but not pretty; teams that want polished dashboards often export traces to Grafana. For small deployments, SigNoz bundles tracing, metrics, and logs in one tool and may be simpler to start with.
Free vs Self-Hosted vs Paid
fully freeFully open source under Apache 2.0. CNCF graduated. No paid tier, no hosted service from the Jaeger project.
Infrastructure costs are the real expense:
- Jaeger collector + query service: lightweight, runs on modest hardware
- Storage backend: Elasticsearch ($50-200+/mo) or Cassandra ($100-300+/mo) for production
- Alternative: Jaeger supports in-memory and Badger (embedded) for dev/small-scale
Managed alternatives: Grafana Cloud offers trace ingestion (free tier: 50GB/mo), Datadog ($0.10/million spans), and many APM vendors accept OpenTelemetry traces.
The math: Jaeger is free but Elasticsearch isn't. A production setup with Elasticsearch runs $100-300/mo minimum. Grafana Cloud's free tier might cover small deployments at $0.
Free software. Budget $100-300/mo for the storage backend in production.
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