Jaeger at 10: Forged in Community, Reborn in OpenTelemetry

Most Challenging Part of Tracing Journey to v2 Fueling the Future: The Mentorship Pipeline Mature Ecosystem of Tracing Recognition of the Community Posted on September 1, 2025 by Yuri Shkuro and Jonah Kowall, Jaeger Maintainers In the fast-paced world of software, reaching 10 years is a testament to a project’s resilience, utility, and community strength. Half a decade ago, we celebrated Jaeger’s fifth anniversary , marveling at its growth from a nascent idea to a critical component in the observability stack. Today, as we mark 10 years, we’re not just celebrating longevity; we’re celebrating a profound evolution. Jaeger has been reborn, embracing a future built on collaboration, standardization, and the incredible momentum of OpenTelemetry. For years, the most significant barrier to adopting distributed tracing wasn’t the backend. It was instrumentation. Getting telemetry data out of applications was a complex, often proprietary, and labor-intensive process. Every tracing system had its own SDKs, its own agents, and its own way of doing things. This fragmentation created vendor lock-in and a steep learning curve, hindering widespread adoption. This is where OpenTelemetry changed everything. It didn’t just offer another SDK; it advanced the entire practice of instrumentation. By providing a single, vendor-neutral standard, OpenTelemetry unified both manual instrumentation (SDKs) and automatic instrumentation (agents).