Jaeger 1.35: Distributed Tracing Performance and Storage

Introduction

Jaeger 1.35, released on October 15, 2022, continues to evolve as a leading distributed tracing system for cloud-native applications. This release improves performance, enhances storage backend support, and delivers better Kubernetes integration for comprehensive request observability.

In practice, this release is most relevant when you’re running Kubernetes workloads at scale and your observability stack has to keep up—high-cardinality metrics, noisy alerts, and dashboards that need to stay responsive during incidents.

Performance Improvements

• Query performance optimizations reduce latency for trace queries, especially those involving large time ranges.
• Storage improvements enable better handling of high-volume trace data.
• Index enhancements accelerate trace lookups and filtering.
• Memory management optimizations reduce resource usage during trace processing.

Storage Backend Enhancements

1. Elasticsearch integration improvements provide better performance and reliability.
2. Cassandra support enhancements enable better scalability for large deployments.
3. Badger improvements provide efficient local storage for development and testing.
4. Object storage support enables cost-effective long-term trace retention.

Kubernetes Integration

• Operator improvements simplify deployment and management of Jaeger in Kubernetes.
• Service discovery enhancements automatically discover services and collect traces.
• OpenTelemetry integration provides better compatibility with the observability standard.
• Helm charts simplify installation and configuration.

Observability Features

• Trace analysis improvements provide better insights into request flows and dependencies.
• Service map visualization shows service-to-service communication patterns.
• Metrics integration enables generating metrics from trace data.
• Alerting support enables alerting on trace patterns and anomalies.

Getting Started

kubectl create namespace observability
kubectl apply -n observability -f https://github.com/jaegertracing/jaeger-operator/releases/download/v1.35.0/jaeger-operator.yaml

Create a Jaeger instance:

apiVersion: jaegertracing.io/v1
kind: Jaeger
metadata:
  name: my-jaeger
spec:
  strategy: production
  storage:
    type: elasticsearch
    elasticsearch:
      nodeCount: 3

Summary

Jaeger 1.35 continues to evolve as a leading distributed tracing solution, providing teams with powerful tools for understanding and debugging distributed applications.