Overview
Jaeger is a CNCF open-source distributed tracing platform originally built by Uber. It collects OpenTelemetry/Zipkin traces, stores them in Cassandra, Elasticsearch, or Badger, and provides a UI for visualizing request flows, latency hotspots, and service dependency graphs. It is the go-to self-hosted alternative to Datadog APM's tracing UI.
Where it falls short of Datadog
- Tracing only; no metrics or log aggregation built in
- Production deployments require Cassandra or Elasticsearch for storage at scale
- UI is functional but less polished than commercial APM products
We list the gaps honestly so you can decide if the trade-off is worth owning your data.
Tags
Claim this listing to keep it accurate, add a deploy template, or feature it on relevant pages.
Embed the Jaeger difficulty badge in your README — it links back here.
[](https://openreplace.com/jaeger)Similar open-source projects
Other self-hostable tools in the same space worth comparing.
Fancy self-hosted uptime monitoring with a beautiful dashboard and status pages
Real-time, high-resolution infrastructure monitoring with per-second metrics
Observability and analytics dashboards for metrics, logs, and time series
Industry-standard metrics monitoring and alerting toolkit with PromQL