Jaeger integration

This feature is experimental and may be changed in a future release. It is not yet available on Elastic Cloud. For feature status on Elastic Cloud, see #212.

Elastic APM integrates with Jaeger, an open-source, distributed tracing system. This integration allows users with an existing Jaeger setup to switch from the default Jaeger backend, to ingesting data with Elastic’s APM Server, storing data in Elasticsearch, and visualizing traces in the APM app. Best of all, this can be done without any instrumentation changes in your application code.

Supported architecture

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Jaeger architecture supports different data formats and transport protocols that define how data can be sent to a collector. Elastic APM, as a Jaeger Collector, supports:

Communication with Jaeger Agents via gRPC

The gRPC endpoint supports TLS. If the Jaeger gRPC collector service is enabled, and apm-server.ssl is configured, SSL settings will automatically be applied to APM Server’s Jaeger gRPC endpoint.
Communication with Jaeger Clients via thrift over HTTP

The Client HTTP endpoint does not support TLS.

See the Jaeger docs for more information on Jaeger architecture.

Get started

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Connecting your preexisting Jaeger setup to Elastic APM is easy! First, configure APM Server to receive Jaeger data, then configure your Jaeger Agents or Jaeger Clients to start sending spans to APM Server.

Configure APM Server

Enable the correct jaeger endpoint in the apm-server.yml configuration file.

In a typical Jaeger deployment, Clients send spans to Agents, who forward them to Collectors. If this matches your architecture, enable the gRPC endpoint by setting apm-server.jaeger.grpc.enabled to true.

Alternatively, if you’ve configured your Clients to send spans directly to Collectors (bypassing Jaeger Agents), enable the HTTP endpoint by setting apm-server.jaeger.http.enabled to true.
Configure the host and port that APM Server listens on.

Based on the endpoint enabled in the previous step, configure the relevant host and port:
- apm-server.jaeger.grpc.host defaults to localhost:14250.
- apm-server.jaeger.http.host defaults to localhost:14268.

Configure Jaeger Agent communication with APM Server (gRPC)

As of this writing, the Jaeger Agent binary offers the --reporter.grpc.host-port CLI flag, which can be used to set a static list of collectors for the Jaeger Agent to connect to. The host:port set here should correspond with the value set in apm-server.jaeger.grpc.host.

See the Jaeger CLI flags documentation for more information.

Configure Jaeger Client communication with APM Server (HTTP)

If you’re using an officially supported Jaeger Client library and want to connect directly to APM Server, you need to update the JAEGER_ENDPOINT configuration property. This is the HTTP endpoint the Client will send spans to. The host:port set here should correspond to the value set in apm-server.jaeger.http.host.

See the relevant supported Jaeger library for more information.

Start sending span data

Data sent from Jaeger Agents or Clients to APM Server should now be visible in the APM app!

Caveats

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There are some limitations and differences between Elastic APM and Jaeger that you should be aware of.

Jaeger integration limitations:

Because Jaeger has its own trace context header, and does not currently support W3C trace context headers, it is not possible to mix and match the use of Elastic’s APM Agents and Jaeger’s Clients.
Sampling decisions cannot currently be pushed from the APM Server.
We currently only support exception logging. Span logs are not supported.

Differences between APM Agents and Jaeger Clients:

Jaeger Clients only sends trace data. APM Agents support a larger number of features, like multiple types of metrics, and application breakdown charts. When using Jaeger, features like this will not be available in the APM app.
Elastic APM’s data model is different than Jaegers. For Jaeger trace data to work with Elastic’s data model, we rely on spans being tagged with the appropriate span.kind.
- Server Jaeger spans are mapped to Elastic APM transactions.
- Client Jaeger spans are mapped to Elastic APM spans — unless the span is the root, in which case it is mapped to an Elastic APM transaction.