Roadmap

The following is only a selection of some of the major features we plan to implement, some of which are near term and some are longer term. We have tried to put these in rough priority as well as having a wishlist at the end. To get a more complete overview of planned features and current work, see the issue trackers for the various repositories, for example, the Jaeger backend.

Support for OpenSearch

Backend storage support for OpenSearch as a backend database. Today this is fully compatible with ElasticSearch APIs, but these may diverge. OpenSearch is Apache 2.0 licensed and hopefully will be led by a community of contributors, but today is led by AWS. ElasticSearch is SSPL licensed and led by Elastic NV making it no longer an open source project.

Integration with OpenTelemetry collector

OpenTelemetry collector is a vendor-agnostic service for receiving, processing and exporting telemetry data. We have decided to rebuild the Jaeger backed components (agent, collector, ingester, all-in-one) on top of OpenTelemetry collector which has several benefits:

  • automatic compatibility with OpenTelemetry SDKs
  • forward compatibility with OpenTelemetry native data model
  • tail-based sampling
  • attribute processors
  • leverage a larger community

More can be found in the blog post Jaeger embraces OpenTelemetry collector, and the earlier post Jaeger and OpenTelemetry that laid out the project strategy. This work will occur after the Collector and associated APIs are more stable, towards the end of 2021.

The current progress can be tracked via issues tagged as area/otel.

Wish List or Longer Term Goals

Data Pipeline

Post-collection data pipeline for trace aggregation and data mining based on Apache Flink. Some of this work has been done and can be found in jaeger-analytics-flink/

AI/ML platform for Jaeger

  • Community/SIG for doing ML/AI with tracing/telemetry data.
  • ML/AI integration with Jaeger to make it easy for data scientists write and evaluate models (e.g Jupyter notebooks).
  • A registry of models/post-processing pipelines which derive useful information out of tracing data.

See issue tracker for more info: jaeger/issues/1639.

Trace Quality Metrics

When deploying a distributed tracing solution like Jaeger in large organizations that utilize many different technologies and programming languages, there are always questions about how much of the architecture is integrated with tracing, what is the quality of the instrumentation, are there microservices that are using stale versions of instrumentation libraries, etc.

Trace Quality engine (jaeger/issues/367) runs analysis on all traces collected in the backend, inspects them for known completeness and quality problems, and provides summary reports to service owners with suggestions on improving the quality metrics and links to sample traces that exhibit the issues.

Dynamic Configuration

We need a dynamic configuration solution (jaeger/issues/355) that comes in handy in various scenarios:

  • Blacklisting services,
  • Overriding sampling probabilities,
  • Controlling server-side downsampling rate,
  • Black/whitelisting services for adaptive sampling,
  • etc.

Ideation

  • Multi-Tenancy (mailgroup thread)
  • Cloud and Multi-DC strategy
  • Flagging of anomalous traces
  • Alerting capabilities to complement operational use cases