APM and Jaeger Integration and going forward

[zvazquez (Zareh Vazquez)]

Hi,

We are in the process to define our observability strategy for our new cloud solution and we are considering to use Elasticsearch APM, now we have already considerable effort done in several of our microservices using Jaeger for traceability.

As this feature is mark as experimental and not available in Elastic Cloud, I have the following questions:

• Does the integration of Jaeger with APM has high possibilities to become standard? can we consider it for a long term project?
• There is comment on this sample yaml file (link) that mentioned that jaeger configuration will be "deprecated, and will be removed in the 8.0 release", is this because in release 8 Jaeger integration will not be supported?
• In the case of Elastic Cloud, this integration is not supported, but can we consider running the Elasticsearch APM server outside of the Elastic Cloud and rather close to our microservices and then just connect the APM server with the Elasticsearch service running in Elastic Cloud?
• Any other consideration that I should consider to use Elasticsearch APM and Jaeger for a long term traceability solution for our cloud application?

Thanks in advance for all your help,

Zareh

[gil (Gil Raphaelli)]

Hello @zvazquez, great questions. The jaeger configuration is deprecated because APM Server will accept jaeger on the same interface as the native Elastic APM intake, per this comment:

  # Jaeger gRPC is now served on the same port as Elastic APM agents, defined by the
  # "apm-server.host" configuration; it is implicitly enabled, and an agent tag called
  # "elastic-apm-auth" is required when auth is enabled.

As far as standards go, Jaeger itself states:

The future Jaeger backend components will be based on OpenTelemetry collector. This integration will make all OpenTelemetry Collector features available in the Jaeger backend components.

The OpenTelemetry Collector already knows how to send traces to APM Server so whether you end up using Jaeger or OpenTelemetry, Elastic APM has you covered.

@zvazquez

In the case of Elastic Cloud, this integration is not supported, but can we consider running the Elasticsearch APM server outside of the Elastic Cloud and rather close to our microservices and then just connect the APM server with the Elasticsearch service running in Elastic Cloud?

Yes, certainly. Also, you can follow Jaeger Intake on Elastic Cloud · Issue #212 · elastic/apm · GitHub for availability on Elastic Cloud.