The Elastic APM integration became generally available in 7.16 — see the APM Guide for updated documentation. Standalone APM Server users can see the Legacy APM Overview and Legacy APM Server Reference.
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Configure Jaeger

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Configure Jaeger

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This functionality is in technical preview and may be changed or removed in a future release. Elastic will work to fix any issues, but features in technical preview are not subject to the support SLA of official GA features.

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 the Elastic Stack — transform data with APM Server, store data in Elasticsearch, and visualize traces in the Kibana APM app. Best of all, no instrumentation changes are needed in your application code.

Ready to get started? See the How to integrate with Jaeger guide.

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.

  • APM Server serves Jaeger gRPC over the same host and port as the Elastic APM agent protocol.
  • The APM Server gRPC endpoint supports TLS. If apm-server.ssl is configured, SSL settings will automatically be applied to APM Server’s Jaeger gRPC endpoint.
  • The gRPC endpoint supports probabilistic sampling. Sampling decisions can be configured centrally with APM Agent central configuration, or locally in each Jaeger client.

See the Jaeger docs for more information on Jaeger architecture.

Communication with Jaeger Clients via thrift over HTTP (deprecated)

Deprecated in 7.13.0.

To be removed in 8.0.0

If you’ve configured your Jaeger clients to send spans directly to collectors (bypassing Jaeger agents), enable the APM Server HTTP endpoint by setting apm-server.jaeger.http.enabled to true. Use apm-server.jaeger.http.host to change the default port.

  • The Client HTTP endpoint does not support TLS or sampling, and is not supported by our hosted Elasticsearch Service on Elastic Cloud.

  • 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.

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.
  • Elastic APM only supports probabilistic sampling.
  • 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.

Configuration options

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Deprecated in 7.13.0.

APM Server serves Jaeger gRPC over the same port as the Elastic APM agent protocol. The following configuration options have been deprecated

You can specify the following options in the apm-server.jaeger.* section of the apm-server.yml configuration file.

grpc.enabled
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Set to true to enable the Jaeger gRPC collector service. Defaults to false.

grpc.host
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Define the gRPC host and port the server is listening on. Defaults to the standard Jaeger gRPC collector port 14250.

grpc.auth_tag
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Set to the name of the tag that should be used for authorizing Jaeger agents. By default, authorization does not apply to Jaeger agents.

http.enabled
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Set to true to enable the Jaeger HTTP collector endpoint. Defaults to false.

http.host
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Define the HTTP host and port the server is listening on. Defaults to the standard Jaeger HTTP collector port 14268.

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