Jaeger

Jaeger is an open-source, end-to-end distributed tracing platform that provides visibility into the complex interactions within microservice architectures. Originally created by Uber Technologies to monitor thousands of microservices and now a graduated Cloud Native Computing Foundation project, Jaeger has become the industry standard for distributed tracing. By instrumenting your applications with OpenTelemetry SDKs, Jaeger captures trace data showing how requests propagate through your system—revealing service dependencies, request paths, timing breakdowns, and error propagation. This visibility is essential for modern cloud-native applications where a single user request might traverse dozens of services, making traditional debugging approaches inadequate for identifying performance issues and failures.

Common Use Cases

Development teams use Jaeger to understand microservice dependencies and identify which services are involved in specific user workflows, visualizing the complete architecture through automatically generated service graphs. SRE and operations teams leverage Jaeger to diagnose production incidents by tracing failed requests through the entire system, identifying exactly which service caused an error and why subsequent services failed. Performance engineers analyze trace data to find bottlenecks, comparing response times across services to identify slow database queries, inefficient API calls, or network latency issues that impact user experience. Platform teams implementing service mesh architectures like Istio use Jaeger as the default tracing backend, automatically capturing traces without requiring application changes through sidecar injection. DevOps teams monitor deployment impacts by comparing traces before and after releases, quickly identifying performance regressions or new error patterns introduced by code changes.

Key Features

• Distributed context propagation across service boundaries with OpenTelemetry integration
• Web UI for searching traces, analyzing latency, and visualizing service dependencies
• Support for multiple span storage backends including memory, Elasticsearch, Cassandra, and Kafka
• Root cause analysis through detailed trace timelines showing every operation and its duration
• Service performance monitoring with metrics like request rates, error rates, and latencies
• Adaptive sampling strategies to control trace collection volume in high-traffic systems
• Service dependency graphs showing relationships and call volumes between services
• Integration with Prometheus, Grafana, and other observability tools
• Multi-tenancy support for isolating traces across different teams or environments
• Backwards compatibility with Zipkin tracing format for easy migration
• Trace comparison features to analyze performance changes between deployments
• REST API for programmatic access to trace data and service graphs

Security Considerations

IMPORTANT: This Jaeger deployment has no built-in authentication or access controls. The web UI and API endpoints are completely open to anyone who can reach the ports. This configuration is designed for trusted internal networks, development environments, or scenarios where network-level security controls are in place. For production deployments accessible from untrusted networks, you must implement additional security measures: deploy a reverse proxy (like Traefik or Nginx) with authentication in front of Jaeger, configure VPS firewall rules to restrict access to specific IP addresses or networks, use VPN access to limit connectivity to authorized users only, or deploy Jaeger within a private network segment isolated from public internet access. Trace data often contains sensitive information including user identifiers, API keys in headers, database queries, and internal system architecture details, making unauthorized access a significant security risk.

Why deploy Jaeger on Hostinger VPS

Deploying Jaeger on a Hostinger VPS provides a dedicated tracing infrastructure under your complete control, essential for teams running microservices who need observability without relying on expensive commercial APM solutions. With dedicated resources, Jaeger can ingest and query high trace volumes without the performance degradation common in shared SaaS offerings, ensuring fast UI response times even when analyzing complex distributed transactions. The all-in-one deployment gets you operational immediately for development and testing, with the flexibility to add persistent storage backends like Elasticsearch when ready for production without migrating to a different platform. Sensitive trace data containing business logic, user identifiers, and system internals remains completely private on your infrastructure, crucial for compliance requirements and security policies that prohibit sending operational telemetry to third parties. The predictable VPS costs scale with your infrastructure rather than per-trace pricing that can explode with high-traffic applications, making Hostinger VPS ideal for growing teams implementing observability practices.