Ingesting spans from Jaeger using OpenTelemetry

You can receive spans from Jaeger using the corresponding OpenTelemetry Collector receiver and then export the data to Uptrace using the OpenTelemetry protocol.

• OpenTelemetry Collector
• Jaeger receiver
• Jaeger Agent and HotRod
• Example
• OpenTelemetry

OpenTelemetry Collector

OpenTelemetry Collector is an agent that pulls telemetry data from systems you want to monitor and sends it to tracing tools using the OpenTelemetry protocol (OTLP).

You can use OpenTelemetry Collector to monitor host metrics, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, and more.

Jaeger receiver

Jaeger Agent is a component that is responsible for receiving spans from the instrumented application and forwarding it to a collector, so that data gets appropriately stored.

To receive data from Jaeger Agent, you need to configure jaeger receiver in the OpenTelemetry Collector:

receivers:
  jaeger:
    protocols:
      # listens on :14250
      grpc:

exporters:
  # export data to Uptrace
  otlp/uptrace:
    endpoint: localhost:14317
    tls:
      insecure: true
    headers: { 'uptrace-dsn': 'http://project2_secret_token@localhost:14318?grpc=14317' }

processors:
  batch:
    send_batch_size: 10000
    timeout: 10s

service:
  pipelines:
    traces:
      receivers: [otlp, jaeger]
      processors: [batch]
      exporters: [otlp/uptrace]

Jaeger Agent and HotRod

Once OpenTelemetry Collector is ready to accept data, you need to provide Jaeger Agent the port on which the Collector is listening:

services:
  jaeger-agent:
    image: jaegertracing/jaeger-agent:latest
    command: ['--reporter.grpc.host-port=localhost:14250']
    network_mode: host

Then make sure your app is sending data to the Jaeger Agent, for example, using Hot Rod application:

services:
  jaeger-hot-rod:
    image: jaegertracing/example-hotrod:latest
    command: ['all']
    network_mode: host
    environment:
      - JAEGER_AGENT_HOST=localhost
      - JAEGER_AGENT_PORT=6831
    depends_on:
      - jaeger-agent

Example

See Docker example which demonstrates how to use Uptrace, OpenTelemetry Collector, and Jaeger Agent together.

OpenTelemetry

Jaeger and OpenTelemetry are complementary technologies. Jaeger is a specialized distributed tracing system, while OpenTelemetry is a broader observability framework that includes tracing, metrics, and logging.

So while Jaeger focuses specifically on distributed tracing, OpenTelemetry provides a more comprehensive approach to observability by including tracing, metrics, and logging.

You can use Jaeger as the default OpenTelemetry backend when using OpenTelemetry to collect telemetry from your applications.

• Jaeger vs Prometheus