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.
What to do by team size
- Solo
- overkill — use Grafana Cloud free tier for traces
- Small team
- consider SigNoz for an all-in-one solution
- Medium team
- viable if you already run Elasticsearch or Cassandra
- Large team
- standard choice — pairs well with your existing observability stack
Get tools like this every Wednesday
One featured tool, three on the radar. No fluff.
Similar Tools
Monitoring system and time series database
Prowler is the world’s most widely used open-source cloud security platform that automates security and compliance across any cloud environment.
Fast monitoring and time series DB
APM and monitoring system
Kubescape is an open-source Kubernetes security platform for your IDE, CI/CD pipelines, and clusters. It includes risk analysis, security, compliance, and misconfiguration scanning, saving Kubernetes users and administrators precious time, effort, and resources.
Highly available Prometheus setup
A low score is not a verdict on quality. Young and niche tools start low by design. How we calculate scores
Trust Signals
About
- Stars
- 23,217
- Forks
- 3,120
Explore Further
More tools in the directory
openclaw
Your own personal AI assistant. Any OS. Any Platform. The lobster way. 🦞
389.9k ★everything-claude-code
The agent harness performance optimization system. Skills, instincts, memory, security, and research-first development for Claude Code, Codex, Opencode, Cursor and beyond.
264.9k ★hermes-agent
The agent that grows with you
247.9k ★