Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

August 2020

Jaeger Turns Five: A Tribute to Project Contributors

August 3rd, 2015 was the date of the first commit in the internal Jaeger repository at Uber. Technically, the true birthday of the project was probably a week or so earlier, because while I was prototyping the collector service we went through a number of project names, some of them rather embarrassing to name here, and the real first commits happened in a differently named repository.

Where did all my spans go? A guide to diagnosing dropped spans in Jaeger

Nothing is more frustrating than feeling like you’ve finally found the perfect trace only to see that you’re missing critical spans. In fact, a common question for new users and operators of Jaeger, the popular distributed tracing system, is: “Where did all my spans go?” In this post we’ll discuss how to diagnose and correct lost spans in each element of the Jaeger ingestion pipeline.

How to maximize span ingestion while limiting writes per second to Scylla with Jaeger

Jaeger primarily supports two backends: Cassandra and Elasticsearch. Here at Grafana Labs we use Scylla, an open source Cassandra-compatible backend. In this post we’ll look at how we run Scylla at scale and share some techniques to reduce load while ingesting even more spans. We’ll also share some internal metrics about Jaeger load and Scylla backend performance. Special thanks to the Scylla team for spending some time with us to talk about performance and configuration!