
Jaeger
CNCF distributed tracing platform
The Lens
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.
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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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