In the fast-paced world of software, reaching 10 years is a testament to a project’s resilience, utility, and community strength. Half a decade ago, we celebrated Jaeger’s fifth anniversary, marveling at its growth from a nascent idea to a critical component in the observability stack. Today, as we mark 10 years, we’re not just celebrating longevity; we’re celebrating a profound evolution. Jaeger has been reborn, embracing a future built on collaboration, standardization, and the incredible momentum of OpenTelemetry.
Most Challenging Part of Tracing
For years, the most significant barrier to adopting distributed tracing wasn’t the backend. It was instrumentation. Getting telemetry data out of applications was a complex, often proprietary, and labor-intensive process. Every tracing system had its own SDKs, its own agents, and its own way of doing things. This fragmentation created vendor lock-in and a steep learning curve, hindering widespread adoption.
This is where OpenTelemetry changed everything. It didn’t just offer another SDK; it advanced the entire practice of instrumentation. By providing a single, vendor-neutral standard, OpenTelemetry unified both manual instrumentation (SDKs) and automatic instrumentation (agents). This solved the hardest part of the tracing puzzle. It created a unified language and a consistent methodology for telemetry, allowing developers to instrument their code once — or not at all, in the case of auto-instrumentation — and send the data to any compatible backend.
For the Jaeger project, the rise of OpenTelemetry was a watershed moment. It presented an opportunity to shed the burden of maintaining its own clients and to focus on what it does best: providing a powerful, scalable, and intuitive tracing product. The decision was made to go all-in on OpenTelemetry, a move that has defined Jaeger’s recent evolution and solidified its place in the modern observability landscape.
Journey to v2
The journey to Jaeger v2 and the full embrace of OpenTelemetry was a massive undertaking. The culmination of this strategic shift is a fundamental re-architecture of the Jaeger backend. Jaeger v2 is built on the OpenTelemetry Collector, leveraging its flexible, extensible pipeline to process and route telemetry data.
This new architecture brings a host of benefits:
- Unified and simplified: The multiple binaries of Jaeger v1 have been replaced by a single, streamlined binary. This simplifies deployment and provides a consistent configuration experience.
- Native OpenTelemetry support: Jaeger v2 natively understands the OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP) end to end, eliminating the need for translation layers and improving performance.
- Unprecedented flexibility: By building on the OpenTelemetry Collector, Jaeger inherits its rich ecosystem of receivers, processors, and exporters. This allows for advanced data manipulation, from tail-based sampling to PII filtering and seamless integration with other observability tools.
- Future-proofed: The tight alignment with OpenTelemetry ensures that Jaeger will continue to evolve alongside the industry standard, benefiting from the collective innovation of the entire observability community.
Fueling the Future: The Mentorship Pipeline
This transition was made possible by the dedication of the project’s maintainers and the vibrant community that surrounds it. A special and heartfelt thank you goes to the participants of the LFX Mentorship program and Google Summer of Code. These programs have become a critical pipeline for talent and innovation, directly fueling Jaeger’s evolution.
Major, tangible progress has been driven by these mentees. We’ve seen foundational work on Jaeger v2 from Harshvir Potpose, James Ryans, and Pushkar Mishra. The Jaeger v2 Kubernetes Operator and Helm Chart were advanced by Ankit Kurmi and Mehul Gautam. Key architectural components like the Kafka-based architecture and Service Performance Monitoring were tackled by Harshith Mente and Raghuram Kannan. The UI has seen significant upgrades, with Ansh Goyal and Vishvamsinh Vaghela updating it to the latest React.js, Prathamesh Mutkure unifying graph views, and Hariom Gupta upgrading charts. We’ve also expanded our backend support, with Yashwanth Reddy building support for Elasticsearch 8 and Minh Nguyen working on native SPM support. This is just a sample of the incredible work done by all our mentees, including Chahat Sagar, Manik Mehta, Saransh Shankar, Afzal Ansari, GLVS Kiriti, and Ha Anh Vu.
Their fresh perspectives, hard work, and technical contributions have not just been helpful; they have been instrumental. We are immensely proud of what they have accomplished and are excited to see them grow into regular contributors and the future maintainers of the project.
Mature Ecosystem of Tracing
The move to OpenTelemetry and the release of Jaeger v2 represent a significant maturation of the Jaeger project. The focus has shifted from building a self-contained system to creating a core component within a larger, collaborative ecosystem.
This unification extends to the entire tracing pipeline. With OpenTelemetry handling instrumentation, and the OpenTelemetry Collector providing a standardized data processing layer, Jaeger can now focus on its core mission: providing a robust, scalable, pluggable storage and query engine for traces. The continued support for popular backends like Cassandra and Elasticsearch, along with the upcoming addition of ClickHouse as an official storage backend, underscores this commitment to flexibility and choice.
Recognition of the Community
As we look back on 10 years of Jaeger, one thing remains constant: the incredible community that has built, maintained, and championed the project. From the early days at Uber to its graduation within the CNCF and the countless contributions from individuals and organizations around the world, Jaeger is a testament to the power of open source collaboration.
The scale of this collaboration is staggering. Five years ago, the project’s impressive momentum was already clear, with 302 companies contributing 4.3K code commits and 3.2K pull requests. That momentum has not only continued but accelerated. Today, the community has grown to 1,359 contributors from 597 companies. The core Jaeger repository has surpassed 6.5k commits and 5.1k pull requests. This incredible growth, with a diverse range of organizations from startups to tech giants investing in Jaeger’s future, is a direct reflection of the project’s importance and the community’s unwavering dedication.
The future of Jaeger is focused on continuing this platform evolution. We will no longer maintain Jaeger v1, which will be fully deprecated in January 2026 following the last v1 release in December 2025. The rest of the roadmap includes supporting even more backends and, most importantly, creating easier ways for new users to demo the project and get value quickly. By lowering the barrier to entry, we can bring the immense power of tracing to an even wider audience. Here’s to the last 10 years, and to a future that is open, unified, and more accessible than ever.