Jaeger Tracing

Deploy Jaeger for distributed tracing across microservices. Set up trace collection, instrument apps with OpenTelemetry, analyze spans to find latency bottlenecks, and configure sampling and storage backends like Elasticsearch or Cassandra.

This skill helps you run distributed tracing with Jaeger. It deploys the collector, query, and agent components, instruments services via the OpenTelemetry SDK and OTLP, configures head- and tail-based sampling strategies, wires storage backends (Elasticsearch, Cassandra, Badger), and uses the Jaeger UI to trace requests across services and pinpoint slow spans. It also covers span tagging, trace context propagation, and integrating Jaeger with a service mesh.

When to use

Use when setting up Jaeger distributed tracing — collectors, OpenTelemetry instrumentation, sampling strategies, storage backends, or analyzing traces to find cross-service latency bottlenecks.

Examples

Instrument a service

Export spans to Jaeger

Instrument a Node.js Express service with the OpenTelemetry SDK to export spans over OTLP to a Jaeger collector, propagating trace context to downstream HTTP calls

Production deployment

Collector plus Elasticsearch

Write Kubernetes manifests for a production Jaeger deployment using the collector/query split with Elasticsearch storage and a 10% probabilistic sampling strategy