Adoption & Ecosystem

Who uses it

These adopters have a public case study, talk, or engineering post. The project's ADOPTERS.md lists more than 26 organisations including Tencent, Northwestern Mutual, SeatGeek, and Nets; the ones below are those with a citable account of how they use Jaeger.

Organisation	Use case	Source
Uber	Built Jaeger to trace requests across its microservices.	Evolving Distributed Tracing at Uber Engineering
Grafana Labs	Used Jaeger and reported query performance gains up to 10x.	Grafana Labs case study
Logz.io	Tuned Jaeger for tracing performance at scale.	Performance Blitz with Jaeger
Ticketmaster	Traces 100 million transactions per day with Jaeger.	Ticketmaster case study
Weaveworks	Combined Jaeger tracing with logs and metrics for troubleshooting.	Weaveworks case study
Red Hat	Listed in ADOPTERS.md; maintains the jaeger-openshift integration.	ADOPTERS.md

Adoption signals

Measured from the GitHub API on 2026-06-22: 22,911 stars, 2,967 forks, 446 open issues, and roughly 482 contributors. The repository was created on 2016-04-15. Jaeger was the seventh project to graduate in CNCF (2019-10-31), per the graduation announcement. The maintainer roster (MAINTAINERS.md) spans Grafana Labs, Red Hat, Bloomberg, Meta, Paessler, and PackSmith, and includes the original author Yuri Shkuro.

Ecosystem

• OpenTelemetry: v2 is built on the OpenTelemetry Collector, and instrumentation uses the OpenTelemetry SDKs.
• Prometheus: Service Performance Monitoring (SPM) derives RED metrics from spans via the spanmetrics connector.
• Kafka: kafkareceiver and kafkaexporter let Kafka act as an ingestion buffer.
• Grafana: a common visualization front end for Jaeger data.
• Storage backends: Cassandra, Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, ClickHouse, Badger, in-memory, and a remote gRPC store.
• Kubernetes: the jaeger-operator deploys and manages Jaeger; service meshes such as Istio and Envoy commonly send traces to it.

Alternatives

Alternative	Differs by
Grafana Tempo	Object-storage backed and cost-optimized, tightly tied to Grafana. Jaeger offers pluggable storage backends with its own UI and query API.
Zipkin	The earlier OSS project Jaeger drew from. Jaeger can receive Zipkin-format spans through its zipkin receiver.
SigNoz	OpenTelemetry-native unified observability. Jaeger focuses on tracing and carries CNCF Graduated status and a long adoption record.
Commercial APM (Datadog, New Relic, Honeycomb, Elastic APM, AWS X-Ray)	Managed, with bundled metrics and logs. Jaeger is open source, trace-focused, and OTel Collector-native in v2.