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Jaeger

Distributed tracing backend for microservices.

Overview

Property Value
Namespace jaeger
Type HelmRelease
Layer Logging & Tracing (Layer 2)
Dependencies Foundation services
Access http://jaeger.local

Purpose

Jaeger is used for monitoring and troubleshooting microservices-based distributed systems, providing end-to-end distributed tracing.

Features

  • Distributed Tracing - Track requests across services
  • Root Cause Analysis - Identify performance bottlenecks
  • Service Dependencies - Visualize service topology
  • Performance Optimization - Identify slow operations

Architecture

graph LR
    subgraph Applications
        A1[Service A]
        A2[Service B]
        A3[Service C]
    end

    subgraph Collection
        OT[OpenTelemetry<br/>Collector]
    end

    subgraph Backend
        J[Jaeger]
    end

    subgraph UI
        JUI[Jaeger UI]
    end

    A1 -->|spans| OT
    A2 -->|spans| OT
    A3 -->|spans| OT
    OT -->|export| J
    J -->|query| JUI

Trace Components

Component Description
Trace End-to-end request journey
Span Single operation within a trace
Tags Key-value metadata
Logs Structured events within spans

Access

http://jaeger.local

kubectl port-forward -n jaeger svc/jaeger-query 16686:16686

Then visit http://localhost:16686

Using the UI

Search Traces

  1. Select service from dropdown
  2. Set time range
  3. Optionally filter by:
  4. Operation name
  5. Tags
  6. Duration (min/max)
  7. Click "Find Traces"

Analyze Trace

  • Timeline view - Span hierarchy and timing
  • Critical path - Longest path through trace
  • Span details - Tags, logs, process info

Verification

# Check Jaeger pods
kubectl get pods -n jaeger

# Check services
kubectl get svc -n jaeger

Troubleshooting

No traces appearing

  1. Verify applications are instrumented
  2. Check OpenTelemetry Collector is running
  3. Verify collector is exporting to Jaeger
# Check OTEL collector
kubectl logs -n opentelemetry deploy/opentelemetry-collector

UI not loading

# Check Jaeger query service
kubectl get pods -n jaeger -l app.kubernetes.io/component=query
kubectl logs -n jaeger -l app.kubernetes.io/component=query