In this article, we will explore 5 Jaeger alternatives you can test out immediately. We chose to cover these tools specifically because you can start using them today, and they provide a free version with enough room to play around with.
The tools we are covering:
- Aspecto
- Honeycomb
- SigNoz
- Lightstep
- Logz.io
As you probably know, Jaeger Tracing is a suite of open source projects managing the entire distributed tracing “stack”: client, collector, and UI. Jaeger UI is the most commonly used open-source to visualize traces.
These Jaeger alternatives can replace the entire Jaeger suite, though we will focus mainly on trace visualization.
Another noteworthy aspect of these Jaeger alternatives is OpenTelemetry support. Most of these tools support OpenTelemetry whether you already have it running in your system or looking for an OpenTelemetry distro (an OpenTelmetry SDK with some vendor-specific customizations).
P.S. Shoutout to all of them for providing excellent OpenTelemetry education and resources.
Top Jaeger Alternatives in 2022
Before jumping in, make sure to check these checkboxes when looking for a Jaeger alternative:
- A free version and you can test it out quickly
- Supports OpenTelemetry
- Provides the same or better trace visualization capabilities
- Allows you to search and investigate trace data efficiently
Aspecto
Aspecto is an end-to-end distributed tracing platform that is fully compatible with OpenTelemetry. Aspecto allows developers to troubleshoot performance bottlenecks and errors within their microservices and correlate root causes across traces and logs.
Dev and observability teams use Aspecto as their OpenTelemetry infrastructure. From fully supporting the implementation to the consumption, management, scalability, and visualization of OpenTelemetry data.
Notable features
- 1) Advanced OpenTelemetry data search and filtering capabilities such as free text search, key value search, and filters by parameters.
- 2) Advanced service map visualization: Aspecto offers a service map visualization to improve your troubleshooting abilities and create a clear image of the relations between services.
- 3) Logs and traces integration: Integrate Aspecto and your logging solution to correlate logs with their matched traces, side-by-side, under a single view so you short-cut your debugging workflow.
- 4) Remote sampling configuration: Remotely configure new OpenTelemetry head and tail sampling rules from the Aspecto UI without changing your code.
- 5) End-to-end message broker visibility: Visualize and understand the entire journey messages go through (including Kafka, RabbitMQ, SQS, and more)
Pricing
Aspecto has a Free Forever Plan with unlimited features and users. Its paid plans start as low as $4 per 5M traces per month. Aspecto also offers a plan for R&D teams needing tailored OpenTelemetry implementation.
You can also give the free playground a try.
Product Overview
Honeycomb
Honeycomb is an observability tool designed for engineering teams providing visibility to troubleshoot distributed systems. Honeycomb provides an automatic instrumentation agent called Honeycomb Beelines and also supports OpenTelemetry.
Notable features
- BubbleUp — Automatically detecting anomalies, highlighted and visualized on a heatmap
- SLOs — Set up triggered alerts based on incident response time and other important service level objectives.
- Metrics — View system metrics alongside application observability data
Pricing
Honeycomb offers a free plan, and its paid plan starts at $110. The pricing is based on event volume captured per month.
Product Overview
Lightstep
Lightstep offers two solutions — incident response and observability tool. Incident Response helps IT Operations and DevOps find their path to fast incident resolution. The Lightstep Observability platform combines metric and tracing data to gain observability to your system.
Notable features
- Change Intelligence — This allows you to surface important changes in your system. Change Intelligence correlates changes found in traces with deviations in your data.
- Notebook — Query and save both your infrastructure (metrics) and app performance (traces) data in one place
- Create alerts for metric data — You can create alerts for your metric data by configuring thresholds against metric queries that when crossed, trigger the alert
Pricing
For its observability solution, Lightstep offers a Free version to help you get started. Its paid plan starts at $100 per month and is based on the number of monthly active services.
Product Overview
SigNoz
SigNoz is a full-stack open-source APM and observability tool. It captures both metrics and traces. Since SigNoz is an open-source project It can be self-hosted so you won’t need to send your data to any third party.
Notable features
- Metrics support — visualize your Prometheus metrics.
- Live view — test your app by debugging traces in real time
- Service map visualization — visualize all services and the relations between them
Pricing
Signoz has a Free Plan for self-hosted apps and limited features. Its paid plans start from $200 which acquire you additional premium features such as hosting & managing your app by Signoz
Product Overview
Logz.io
Similar to Lightstep, Logz.io offers various features among them you can find Distributed tracing. Logz.io offers managed Jaeger Tracing as their distributed tracing solution and, on top of Jaeger, they offer additional features. This is a good option if you want to stick to Jaeger but looking for a managed solution.
Notable features
- Managed Elasticsearch with Jaeger
- Real-time alerting — identify high-priority production incidents and receive alerts via Slack, email, and other tools.
- Service Performance Monitoring dashboard — View request rate, error rate, and latency under a single dashboard. The dashboard includes a breakdown of R.E.D data based on the operations running inside the chosen service.
Pricing
Logz.io offers a free plan for collecting small log volumes with advanced analytics and Up to 1 GB of log data. Its paid plan starts at 5$ Per million spans.
Product Overview
https://www.aspecto.io/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/Yalla-Zehooo.mp4
Jaeger and why you may want alternatives
If you’re reading this article, you probably have some experience with Jaeger and concluded that Jaeger is powerful, but it might not be the best solution for you.
We hope that the option we provided above, each unique in its way, will serve you well in finding your observability match.
Since Jaeger is so tied together with OpenTelemetry, and if you want to learn more, we recommend you check out our free OpenTelemtry Bootcamp which you can find here or on Youtube.
Getting Started with Aspecto
Aspecto has a free-forever tier and provides everything included in Jaeger and more. Like Jaeger on steroids. Feel free to try the playground and sign up for the free forever plan.
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