What is Jaeger Used for?

Last updated: February 8, 2026Reviewed date: February 8, 2026Reading time: 7 min read
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Jaeger is software that you can use to monitor and troubleshoot problems on interconnected software components called microservices. Several microservices communicate with each other to complete a single software function. Developers use Jaeger to visualize the chain of events in these microservice interactions to isolate...

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Article Summary

Jaeger is software that you can use to monitor and troubleshoot problems on interconnected software components called microservices. Several microservices communicate with each other to complete a single software function. Developers use Jaeger to visualize the chain of events in these microservice interactions to isolate the problem when something goes wrong. Jaeger is also called Jaeger Tracing because it follows, or traces, the path of...

Key Takeaways

  • This article explains Why is Jaeger important? in simple medical language.
  • This article explains What is Jaeger used for? in simple medical language.
  • This article explains How does Jaeger work? in simple medical language.
  • This article explains What are the components of Jaeger? in simple medical language.
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Seek urgent medical care if you notice

These warning signs are general safety guidance. Local emergency numbers and clinical judgment should always come first.

  • Severe symptoms, breathing difficulty, fainting, confusion, or rapidly worsening illness.
  • New weakness, severe pain, high fever, or symptoms after a serious injury.
  • Any symptom that feels urgent, unusual, or unsafe for the patient.
1

Emergency now

Use emergency care for severe, sudden, rapidly worsening, or life-threatening symptoms.

2

See a doctor

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Jaeger is software that you can use to monitor and troubleshoot problems on interconnected software components called microservices. Several microservices communicate with each other to complete a single software function. Developers use Jaeger to visualize the chain of events in these microservice interactions to isolate the problem when something goes wrong. Jaeger is also called Jaeger Tracing because it follows, or traces, the path of a request through a series of microservice interactions.

Why is Jaeger important?

In the past, software design was monolithic, with several functions bundled together in a single code base. For example, to design a food ordering app, the food menu, restaurants, and payment systems were all bundled into a single software unit. This type of software design made the solution more complex and difficult to maintain. When developers made code changes in one area, it affected the entire system, making change management a long and tedious process. To solve this problem, architecture design became more modular.

Microservices

Modern applications function as a collection of smaller independent units called microservices. For example, a modern food-ordering app might consist of these parts:

  • A geolocation service to detect where the customer is
  • A service that collects and sends orders to restaurants
  • A payment gateway with several payment options

Each microservice works as an independent application and has access to its own database and logic. Microservices communicate with each other using requests and responses, like a web application. A microservices base system is also called a distributed system.

Troubleshooting microservices architecture

It is challenging to investigate problems in distributed systems because of the complex behavior of microservices. For example, placing a food order on a modular app might trigger several requests to different microservices. These requests can happen concurrently and independently and need not be sequential. If a problem occurs with the food order, developers need to determine which microservice caused it. Conventional problem tracking approaches provide only a partial picture of the request, making troubleshooting microservices tedious.

Jaeger is a software tool that IT teams use to gain visibility and clarity on the whole chain of events. They can resolve problems faster and improve the customer experience.

What is Jaeger used for?

Developers use Jaeger to improve distributed system performance in several different ways. We give some examples below.

Distributed transaction monitoring

Jaeger has features that monitor data movements between microservices. Developers can take a proactive approach to detect and resolve problems before disrupting the user experience.

Latency optimization

Jaeger analytics can locate bottlenecks in microservices that slow down an application. Developers use Jaeger to inspect the behavior of microservices and find ways to make them faster.

Root cause analysis

In a microservice architecture, one problem can lead to others. Developers can use Jaeger to find the starting point of a series of related issues in an application.

Service dependency analysis

Service dependency means an application depends on several components to run. For example, a navigation app depends on location services on the mobile app. Developers use Jaeger to understand the complex relationships between the different microservices.

Distributed context propagation

Distributed context propagation is the way an application passes descriptive information along with the data. This helps developers to evaluate microservice performance as a whole. For example, Jaeger tags order requests with the customer’s name so that developers can associate the request path with the specific customer.

How does Jaeger work?

Jaeger works on the principles of distributed tracing and uses the OpenTracing framework.

Distributed tracing 

Distributed tracing is a software technique that monitors sequences of events among microservices. It keeps track of all connections and provides charts and graphs to visualize request paths in an application. As a distributed tracing tool, Jaeger tracks request movements by assigning a unique identifier to each request and collecting information when a particular service processes the request.

OpenTracing 

OpenTracing is an open-source, or freely available, framework that gives the standards to make accurate, turnkey distributed tracing a reality across modern software systems. For example, it provides a common standard for defining the structure of monitored information that travels between microservices. Jaeger uses OpenTracing to provide a complete solution to collect, store, manage, analyze, and visualize microservices data.

OpenTracing data model

The OpenTracing data model provides the basic definition to connect data from different components. The two main terms it uses are span and trace.

Span 

A span is a single logical unit of work done in a distributed tracing system. Each span has these components:

  • An operation name
  • A start time and stop time
  • Tags or values that help developers to analyze the span
  • Logs that store any messages the microservice generates
  • Span context or additional descriptions of the span

Trace

A trace is a collection of one or more spans that belong to the same process. It represents the events that happen during a specific time. Spans that belong to the same trace share the same Trace ID. For example, a trace that is generated when a customer orders food results in the following spans:

  • Customer submits an order
  • Payment is processed
  • Order list is submitted to the restaurant
  • Food is picked up
  • Food is delivered

What are the components of Jaeger?

The Jaeger distributed tracing platform consists of the following components.

Jaeger client 

The Jaeger client contains language-specific implementations of OpenTracing API in programming languages like Go, JavaScript, Java, Python, Ruby, and PHP.

Developers use these APIs to create Jaeger spans without writing the source code for distributed tracing.

Jaeger agent

The Jaeger agent is a network daemon or a process that runs continuously in the background to perform functions that are required by other processes. It listens for spans that the client sends through user datagram protocol (UDP), a type of communication method that allows applications to exchange messages over a network.

The agent connects to the client in container environments like Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service. The agent groups create spans in batches and send them to the collector. This allows the application to run without actively sending trace information to the Jaeger backend.

Jaeger collector 

A Jaeger collector is a software component that retrieves traces from the Jaeger collector. It checks, processes, and stores the traces in the database.

Storage

The Jaeger tracing system receives spans and stores them in a persistent storage backend or database. Persistent storage means the stored data remains intact even if the computer is powered off. For instance, developers use AWS Open Search Service as persistent storage for storing and accepting spans.

Ingester

One way to deploy Jaeger is by sending trace data to Kafka, a distributed system for applications to store and retrieve streams of information. An ingester is a module that reads trace data from Kafka and stores it separately.

Query 

The query service retrieves trace information from the database. Developers use queries to find traces with specific time, tags, duration, and operation.

Jaeger Console

Jaeger Console is a software program with a user interface that you can use to view and analyze traces. It displays trace data in graphs and charts.

How do developers use Jaeger?

When developers build an application, they use Jaeger client libraries to create spans. By adding codes to the program to produce trace data, they create what is known as an instrumented application. The instrumented application automatically generates the following:

  1. Spans containing span ID, trace ID, tags, logs, and span context
  2. Traces for every request

Developers use the Jaeger Console to search, filter, visualize, and analyze this distributed tracing data. They can use the Jaeger UI software to view detailed information such as process duration, errors, and logs from the microservices.

What are Jaeger sampling strategies?

An instrumented application automatically transmits trace data whenever the application is running. You can use this trace data to measure application performance. It is also called telemetry data. To prevent the Jaeger backend from being overwhelmed with excessive telemetry data, you can filter or sample it by configuring sampling strategies in your Jaeger implementation. These are some sampling strategies:

  • Constant sampling collects the same number of samples for all types of traces.
  • Probabilistic sampling collects samples randomly until it reaches a certain percentage.
  • Rate limiting sampling retrieves a specific number of samples every second.
  • Adaptive sampling automatically adjusts the sample rate to achieve a number of traces for a specific duration.
Doctor visit helper

Prepare before seeing a doctor

A simple rural-patient checklist to help you explain symptoms clearly, ask better questions, and avoid unsafe self-treatment.

Safety note: This is not a prescription or diagnosis. For severe symptoms, pregnancy danger signs, children with serious illness, chest pain, breathing difficulty, stroke-like weakness, or major injury, seek urgent care.

Which doctor may help?

Start with a registered doctor or the nearest qualified health center.

What to tell the doctor

  • Write when the problem started and how it changed.
  • Bring old prescriptions, investigation reports, and current medicines.
  • Write allergies, pregnancy status, diabetes, kidney/liver disease, and major past illnesses.
  • Bring one family member if the patient is weak, elderly, confused, or a child.

Questions to ask

  • What is the most likely cause of my symptoms?
  • Which danger signs mean I should go to hospital quickly?
  • Which tests are necessary now, and which can wait?
  • How should I take medicines safely and what side effects should I watch for?
  • When should I come for follow-up?

Tests to discuss

  • Vital signs: temperature, pulse, blood pressure, oxygen saturation
  • Basic physical examination by a clinician
  • CBC, urine test, blood sugar, or imaging only when clinically needed

Avoid these mistakes

  • Do not use antibiotics, steroid tablets/injections, or strong painkillers without proper medical advice.
  • Do not hide pregnancy, kidney disease, ulcer, allergy, or blood thinner use.
  • Do not delay emergency care when danger signs are present.

Medicine safety and first-aid guide

This section is for patient education only. It does not replace a doctor, pharmacist, or emergency care.

Safe first steps

  • Rest, drink safe water, and observe symptoms carefully.
  • Keep a written note of symptoms, duration, temperature, medicines already taken, and allergy history.
  • Seek medical care quickly if symptoms are severe, worsening, or unusual for the patient.

OTC medicine safety

  • For mild pain or fever, ask a registered pharmacist or doctor before using common over-the-counter pain/fever medicines.
  • Do not combine multiple pain medicines without advice, especially if you have kidney disease, liver disease, stomach ulcer, asthma, pregnancy, or take blood thinners.
  • Do not give adult medicines to children unless a qualified clinician advises it.

Avoid these mistakes

  • Do not start antibiotics without a proper medical decision.
  • Do not use steroid tablets or injections casually for quick relief.
  • Do not delay emergency care because of home remedies.

Get urgent help if

  • Severe symptoms, confusion, fainting, breathing difficulty, chest pain, severe dehydration, or sudden weakness need urgent medical care.
Medicine names, dose, and timing must be decided by a qualified clinician or pharmacist after checking age, pregnancy, allergy, other diseases, and current medicines.

For rural patients and family caregivers

Patient health record and symptom diary

Write your symptoms, medicines already taken, test results, and questions before visiting a doctor. This note stays on your device unless you print or copy it.

Doctor to discuss: Doctor / qualified healthcare provider
Tests to discuss with doctor
  • Basic vital signs: temperature, pulse, blood pressure, oxygen level if needed
  • Relevant blood, urine, imaging, or specialist tests only after clinical assessment
Questions to ask
  • What is the most likely cause of my symptoms?
  • Which warning signs mean I should go to emergency care?
  • Which tests are really needed now?
  • Which medicines are safe for my age, pregnancy status, allergy, kidney/liver/stomach condition, and current medicines?

Emergency warning signs such as chest pain, severe breathing difficulty, sudden weakness, confusion, severe dehydration, major injury, or loss of bladder/bowel control need urgent medical care. Do not wait for online information.

Safe pathway to proper treatment

Care roadmap for: What is Jaeger Used for?

Use this simple roadmap to understand the next safe steps. It is educational and does not replace examination by a doctor.

Go to emergency care if you notice:
  • Severe or rapidly worsening symptoms
  • Breathing difficulty, chest pain, fainting, confusion, severe weakness, major injury, or severe dehydration
Doctor / service to discuss: Qualified healthcare provider; specialist depends on symptoms and examination.
  1. Step 1

    Check danger signs first

    If danger signs are present, seek emergency care and do not wait for online information.

  2. Step 2

    Record the symptom story

    Write when symptoms started, severity, medicines already taken, allergies, pregnancy status, and test results.

  3. Step 3

    Visit a qualified clinician

    A doctor, nurse, or qualified healthcare provider can examine you and decide which tests or treatment are needed.

  4. Step 4

    Do only useful tests

    Do tests after clinical assessment. Avoid unnecessary tests, random antibiotics, or repeated medicines without diagnosis.

  5. Step 5

    Follow up and return early if worse

    If symptoms worsen, new warning signs appear, or treatment is not helping, return for review quickly.

Rural patient practical tips
  • Take a written symptom diary and all previous prescriptions/test reports.
  • Do not hide medicines already taken, even herbal or over-the-counter medicines.
  • Ask which warning signs mean urgent referral to hospital.

This roadmap is for education. A real diagnosis and treatment plan requires history, examination, and clinical judgment.

RX Patient Help

Ask a health question safely

Write your symptom story. A health professional or site editor can review it before any answer is prepared. This box is not for emergency care.

Emergency first: Severe chest pain, breathing trouble, unconsciousness, stroke signs, severe injury, heavy bleeding, or rapidly worsening symptoms need urgent local medical care now.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why is Jaeger important?

In the past, software design was monolithic, with several functions bundled together in a single code base. For example, to design a food ordering app, the food menu, restaurants, and payment systems were all bundled into a single software unit. This type of software design made the solution more complex and difficult to maintain. When developers made code changes in one area, it affected the entire system, making change management a long and tedious process. To solve this problem, architecture…

Microservices Modern applications function as a collection of smaller independent units called microservices. For example, a modern food-ordering app might consist of these parts:A geolocation service to detect where the customer is A service that collects and sends orders to restaurants A payment gateway with several payment optionsEach microservice works as an independent application and has access to its own database and logic. Microservices communicate with each other using requests and responses, like a web application. A microservices base system is also called a distributed system. Troubleshooting microservices architecture It is challenging to investigate problems in distributed systems because of the complex behavior of microservices. For example, placing a food order on a modular app might trigger several requests to different microservices. These requests can happen concurrently and independently and need not be sequential. If a problem occurs with the food order, developers need to determine which microservice caused it. Conventional problem tracking approaches provide only a partial picture of the request, making troubleshooting microservices tedious.Jaeger is a software tool that IT teams use to gain visibility and clarity on the whole chain of events. They can resolve problems faster and improve the customer experience.What is Jaeger used for?

Developers use Jaeger to improve distributed system performance in several different ways. We give some examples below.

Distributed transaction monitoring Jaeger has features that monitor data movements between microservices. Developers can take a proactive approach to detect and resolve problems before disrupting the user experience. Latency optimization Jaeger analytics can locate bottlenecks in microservices that slow down an application. Developers use Jaeger to inspect the behavior of microservices and find ways to make them faster. Root cause analysis In a microservice architecture, one problem can lead to others. Developers can use Jaeger to find the starting point of a series of related issues in an application. Service dependency analysis Service dependency means an application depends on several components to run. For example, a navigation app depends on location services on the mobile app. Developers use Jaeger to understand the complex relationships between the different microservices. Distributed context propagation Distributed context propagation is the way an application passes descriptive information along with the data. This helps developers to evaluate microservice performance as a whole. For example, Jaeger tags order requests with the customer’s name so that developers can associate the request path with the specific customer.How does Jaeger work?

Jaeger works on the principles of distributed tracing and uses the OpenTracing framework.

Distributed tracing  Distributed tracing is a software technique that monitors sequences of events among microservices. It keeps track of all connections and provides charts and graphs to visualize request paths in an application. As a distributed tracing tool, Jaeger tracks request movements by assigning a unique identifier to each request and collecting information when a particular service processes the request. OpenTracing  OpenTracing is an open-source, or freely available, framework that gives the standards to make accurate, turnkey distributed tracing a reality across modern software systems. For example, it provides a common standard for defining the structure of monitored information that travels between microservices. Jaeger uses OpenTracing to provide a complete solution to collect, store, manage, analyze, and visualize microservices data. OpenTracing data model The OpenTracing data model provides the basic definition to connect data from different components. The two main terms it uses are span and trace. Span  A span is a single logical unit of work done in a distributed tracing system. Each span has these components:An operation name A start time and stop time Tags or values that help developers to analyze the span Logs that store any messages the microservice generates Span context or additional descriptions of the spanTrace A trace is a collection of one or more spans that belong to the same process. It represents the events that happen during a specific time. Spans that belong to the same trace share the same Trace ID. For example, a trace that is generated when a customer orders food results in the following spans:Customer submits an order Payment is processed Order list is submitted to the restaurant Food is picked up Food is deliveredWhat are the components of Jaeger?

The Jaeger distributed tracing platform consists of the following components.

Jaeger client  The Jaeger client contains language-specific implementations of OpenTracing API in programming languages like Go, JavaScript, Java, Python, Ruby, and PHP.Developers use these APIs to create Jaeger spans without writing the source code for distributed tracing. Jaeger agent The Jaeger agent is a network daemon or a process that runs continuously in the background to perform functions that are required by other processes. It listens for spans that the client sends through user datagram protocol (UDP), a type of communication method that allows applications to exchange messages over a network.The agent connects to the client in container environments like Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service. The agent groups create spans in batches and send them to the collector. This allows the application to run without actively sending trace information to the Jaeger backend. Jaeger collector  A Jaeger collector is a software component that retrieves traces from the Jaeger collector. It checks, processes, and stores the traces in the database. Storage The Jaeger tracing system receives spans and stores them in a persistent storage backend or database. Persistent storage means the stored data remains intact even if the computer is powered off. For instance, developers use AWS Open Search Service as persistent storage for storing and accepting spans. Ingester One way to deploy Jaeger is by sending trace data to Kafka, a distributed system for applications to store and retrieve streams of information. An ingester is a module that reads trace data from Kafka and stores it separately. Query  The query service retrieves trace information from the database. Developers use queries to find traces with specific time, tags, duration, and operation. Jaeger Console Jaeger Console is a software program with a user interface that you can use to view and analyze traces. It displays trace data in graphs and charts.How do developers use Jaeger?

When developers build an application, they use Jaeger client libraries to create spans. By adding codes to the program to produce trace data, they create what is known as an instrumented application. The instrumented application automatically generates the following: Spans containing span ID, trace ID, tags, logs, and span context Traces for every request Developers use the Jaeger Console to search, filter, visualize, and analyze this distributed tracing data. They can use the Jaeger UI software to view detailed information…

What are Jaeger sampling strategies?

An instrumented application automatically transmits trace data whenever the application is running. You can use this trace data to measure application performance. It is also called telemetry data. To prevent the Jaeger backend from being overwhelmed with excessive telemetry data, you can filter or sample it by configuring sampling strategies in your Jaeger implementation. These are some sampling strategies: Constant sampling collects the same number of samples for all types of traces. Probabilistic sampling collects samples randomly until it reaches…

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