Jaeger is an open source project with open governance . We welcome contributions from the community, and we’d love your help to improve and extend the project. Below you will find some ideas for how to get involved with the project. Some of them don’t even require any coding. There is also a good CNCF guide on how to start contributing to open source and figure out where to begin .

Bootcamp

In order to understand the project better and come up with reasonable solutions, it’s always helpful to become familiar with Jaeger and its code base. We strongly recommend these steps:

• Go through some Jaeger tutorials, such as this blog post  or this video .
• Run the HotROD demo yourself . The blogs and videos may be outdated, it’s good to get hands on.
• Review the Jaeger architecture and understand the components.
• Fork and clone the respective repositories to be able to build and run the project locally .
• Learn about contributing with the best practices, including how to sign your code and contribute .
• Try to solve some of the simple open issues that you can find across Jaeger repositories.

No-coding involvement

• Join the online chat room and help answering questions from the rest of the community.

• Join our bi-weekly video calls to discuss issues, large initiatives, or present case studies.

• Help documenting answers to common questions, either in Jaeger documentation  or Stackoverflow .

• Help improving Jaeger documentation , especially if you yourself run into issues where something is not clear or not working.

• Publish blog posts or tutorials about Jaeger, for example:

  • What kind of deployment model you chose in your company and why.
  • How to use Jaeger with hosted storage solutions, such as AWS Elasticsearch.
  • What kind of problems you were able to solve with Jaeger in your organization.
  • How did you model traces for non-trivial workflows, like async processing.

  Tips:

  • Tweet about your blog post at @Jaegertracing  and email to jaeger-tracing@googlegroups.com.
  • If your blog is on Medium, reach out to maintainers and we may add it to our official blog .

• Advocate for deploying Jaeger in your company.

• Propose designs for building new capabilities in Jaeger.

• Organize local meetups to explain the benefits of Jaeger and distributed tracing.

Help with coding

Of course, there’s also no shortage of opportunities to help with the actual development of Jaeger. The easiest way to start is with issues labeled as good-first-issue . Note that the Jaeger project includes many different repositories , covering backend components, Jaeger UI, Kubernetes tools, analytics tools, etc. Many of them have these tickets, so pick whichever area interests you the most.

Another label to look for is help-wanted , which we use to tag tickets that involve features that maintainers consider promising / useful, but which are not on the immediate roadmap (after all, we all have day jobs with different priorities).

• Jaeger backend: good-first-issue , help-wanted 
• Jaeger frontend: good-first-issue , help-wanted 

Please refer to the Contributing Guidelines  on how to make code contributions. And make sure to follow the CNCF Code of Conduct .

How do I know if an issue is still relevant?

If the issue is open and labeled as help-wanted there is a very high probability it is still relevant. Only if it is very old (e.g. more than two years) it may no longer be needed and it’s ok to comment on it and confirm.

What if someone is already working on a issue?

We have a policy  of not explicitly assigning the issues to anyone. It is always a good etiquette to verify if someone is already working on the issue:

• Check if there are any open PRs against the issue (see next section).
• If the PR has recent updates (within a week) from the author, the author is likely actively working on it. In this case it is best to wait for the author to finish their work.
• If the most recent comments on the PR are from the maintainers recommending some changes, and those comments are not addressed by the author (for two weeks or more), the PR may have stalled. In this case you can tag the author in the PR and ask if they are still working on it or if they would like to hand it over to someone else.
• Sometimes things fall through the cracks and maintainers miss the recent changes on the PR. If these latest changes look good (e.g. the CI checks are all green) but the maintainers have not reviewed them it’s good to ping the maintainers in the PR asking for a review. Even better if you can help with the review.

How do I know if there are open PRs against the issue?

It’s always a good idea to include the text Resolves #{issue number} in the PR so that GitHub can link it to the issue and to close the issue once the PR is merged. If this is done, you will be able to see the PR number and icon right under the issue description. Alternatively, you can look through the issue comment history and you will also find the links to the PRs that mention the issue (although they may not necessarily be solving that issue, so look deeper).

Mentorship programs

The Jaeger project regularly participates in mentorship programs via CNCF. See Mentorships.