Jaeger is an open-source distributed tracing system designed for monitoring microservice environments. Jaeger collects tracing spans from your services and lets you visualize the end-to-end request flows and latencies between components.

Its UI provides timeline “waterfall” views of traces and a service dependency graph to see how services connect. Jaeger helps “map the flow of requests and data as they traverse a distributed system,” identifying performance bottlenecks and errors to improve reliability.

Being cloud-native and infinitely scalable, Jaeger can handle high trace volumes. It supports open standards (OpenTracing/OpenTelemetry), making integration straightforward. You can deploy Jaeger on-premises or in the cloud (it runs smoothly on Kubernetes), and it’s free to use (no licensing costs).