Follow a single request across all your services — find where time is spent and where things break.

Welcome to Jaeger: Distributed Tracing for Microservices.

Jaeger is a distributed tracing system that follows a single request as it travels across many services, so you can see its full journey and find where time is spent or things go wrong. This free book teaches it from the ground up: distributed tracing fundamentals (traces, spans, context propagation), Jaeger's collect-store-query-visualize architecture, instrumenting applications with OpenTelemetry (the vendor-neutral standard), context propagation and the W3C Trace Context standard, head- and tail-based sampling, storage backends and the Jaeger UI (timelines, search, dependency graphs), tracing in Kubernetes and service meshes like Istio, performance and scaling, and operating Jaeger in production. Ten focused chapters with clear diagrams that show how to make distributed systems observable and debug them in minutes instead of hours.

This title is part of the ShriIra library and is free to read in full, right here — our small contribution to making world-class knowledge easy to reach.

A note on reading it: open the Contents menu at the top of the reader to jump between chapters, use the Aa menu to set a comfortable text size, theme (light, sepia, or night), and single- or two-page layout. Your place is saved automatically, so you can always pick up where you left off.

We hope it serves you well.

— Shriira Press

Contents

1. Chapter 1 — What Jaeger Is
2. Chapter 2 — Distributed Tracing Fundamentals
3. Chapter 3 — Architecture
4. Chapter 4 — Instrumentation and OpenTelemetry
5. Chapter 5 — Context Propagation
6. Chapter 6 — Sampling
7. Chapter 7 — Storage and the UI
8. Chapter 8 — Tracing in Kubernetes and Service Meshes
9. Chapter 9 — Performance and Scaling
10. Chapter 10 — Operating Jaeger and Putting It Together