What is Jaeger used for?

Jaeger is a distributed tracing platform, originally from Uber and now a graduated CNCF project, for monitoring and troubleshooting microservices. It is a good fit for finding latency bottlenecks across services and debugging requests that span many microservices.

Is Jaeger open source?

Yes. Jaeger is open source under the Apache-2.0 licence. Its source code is on GitHub at jaegertracing/jaeger and is written mainly in Go.

Yes. Jaeger is open source, so the software itself is free to use.

Can I self-host Jaeger?

Yes. Jaeger can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure.

What is Jaeger an alternative to?

Jaeger is an open-source alternative to Datadog, Honeycomb, New Relic and Dynatrace. Other open-source alternatives to Datadog include SigNoz, Coroot and HyperDX.

Is Jaeger actively maintained?

Yes. The most recent commit to Jaeger was on 2 October 2026, and the latest release is v2.21.0, published on 14 September 2026. The project has 23k stars on GitHub.

Jaeger: open-source alternative to Datadog, Honeycomb

About Jaeger

Jaeger is a tracing system for distributed applications, created at Uber Technologies and donated to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, where it graduated in October 2019. It records how requests flow through services so teams can monitor and troubleshoot distributed systems. It is written in Go and released under the Apache-2.0 license. The README announces Jaeger v2.

A Docker-based quick start gets a local instance running in seconds, while the documentation covers production deployments and operations. Because Jaeger reuses many components from the OpenTelemetry Collector, the project works to keep configuration compatible between releases and publishes deprecation guidelines for when options change. It is an open project with open governance, welcoming contributions that do not always require code. The repository topics include distributed tracing, observability and OpenTelemetry, and community support runs on Slack.

Key features

Distributed tracing for microservices
Built on OpenTelemetry Collector components
Docker quick start for local use
Version compatibility guidelines
CNCF graduated project
Open governance and community channels

Good fit for

→Finding latency bottlenecks across services
→Debugging requests that span many microservices

Built with: Go
Tags: distributed-tracing; observability; opentelemetry; cncf; microservices; monitoring; golang; tracing

Jaeger: questions and answers

What is Jaeger used for?: Jaeger is a distributed tracing platform, originally from Uber and now a graduated CNCF project, for monitoring and troubleshooting microservices. It is a good fit for finding latency bottlenecks across services and debugging requests that span many microservices.
Is Jaeger open source?: Yes. Jaeger is open source under the Apache-2.0 licence. Its source code is on GitHub at jaegertracing/jaeger and is written mainly in Go.
Is Jaeger free?: Yes. Jaeger is open source, so the software itself is free to use.
Can I self-host Jaeger?: Yes. Jaeger can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure.
What is Jaeger an alternative to?: Jaeger is an open-source alternative to Datadog, Honeycomb, New Relic and Dynatrace. Other open-source alternatives to Datadog include SigNoz, Coroot and HyperDX.
Is Jaeger actively maintained?: Yes. The most recent commit to Jaeger was on 2 October 2026, and the latest release is v2.21.0, published on 14 September 2026. The project has 23k stars on GitHub.