Jaeger

Overview

Jaeger is a CNCF graduated tracing backend: it receives spans, stores them and serves a UI and query API. Jaeger v2 (current line, 2.21.0 in September 2026) is built on the OpenTelemetry Collector: one binary, one image (jaegertracing/jaeger), configured only through a YAML file, and it receives OTLP natively. The v1 images (all-in-one, jaeger-collector, jaeger-query) and their SPAN_STORAGE_TYPE / COLLECTOR_OTLP_ENABLED environment variables are gone from the current docs (v1.76 is the archived last line), and the old Jaeger client libraries are deprecated: instrument with OpenTelemetry SDKs. Docs: https://www.jaegertracing.io/docs/latest/.

Instructions

Task A: Deploy

All-in-one with in-memory storage (data is lost on restart), good for a laptop:

docker run --rm --name jaeger -p 16686:16686 -p 4317:4317 -p 4318:4318 -p 5778:5778 -p 9411:9411 \
  cr.jaegertracing.io/jaegertracing/jaeger:2.21.0

UI at http://localhost:16686, OTLP gRPC on 4317, OTLP HTTP on 4318, remote sampling on 5778. Pin a version tag instead of latest. Any other role or storage needs --config /path/config.yaml mounted into the container. The config uses the OpenTelemetry Collector layout: receivers, processors, exporters, service.pipelines, plus Jaeger extensions jaeger_storage (backends), jaeger_query (UI and API) and remote_sampling. Values can use ${env:NAME:-default}; --set receivers.otlp.protocols.grpc.endpoint=0.0.0.0:4317 overrides one key. Inside a container, receivers must listen on 0.0.0.0.