Jaeger 1.40: Distributed Tracing Performance and Storage Excellence

Introduction

Jaeger 1.40, released on November 7, 2023, is most relevant if your on-call needs clearer signals and faster root cause loops. You typically feel the difference during incidents: faster queries, better signal-to-noise in alerts, and more actionable context when tracing issues across services.

Performance Improvements

• Trace ingestion optimizations reduce latency and improve throughput for high-traffic scenarios.
• Query performance improvements enable faster trace retrieval and analysis.
• Storage optimizations reduce database load and improve query response times.
• Memory usage improvements reduce resource footprint for large-scale deployments.

Storage Backend Enhancements

1. Elasticsearch integration improvements provide better performance and reliability.
2. Cassandra support enhancements enable better scalability and performance.
3. Badger improvements provide better local storage performance.
4. Storage API enhancements enable easier integration with new storage backends.

Kubernetes Integration

• Operator improvements simplify installation and management of Jaeger components.
• Service discovery enhancements automatically discover services and endpoints.
• Resource management improvements provide better resource allocation and limits.
• Helm chart enhancements simplify deployment and configuration.

Observability & Monitoring

• Metrics expansion exposes detailed Jaeger metrics for Prometheus integration.
• Health checks improvements provide better visibility into component health.
• Dashboard integration enables better visualization of tracing data.
• Alerting capabilities enable proactive monitoring of tracing system health.

Getting Started

kubectl create namespace observability
kubectl create -f https://github.com/jaegertracing/jaeger-operator/releases/download/v1.40.0/jaeger-operator.yaml -n observability

Create a Jaeger instance:

apiVersion: jaegertracing.io/v1
kind: Jaeger
metadata:
  name: simple-prod
spec:
  strategy: production
  storage:
    type: elasticsearch
    options:
      es:
        server-urls: http://elasticsearch:9200

Summary

Jaeger 1.40 provides teams with comprehensive distributed tracing capabilities for understanding application behavior and performance.