The technical oversight committee of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation has voted distributed tracing platform Jaeger into Graduate status, lining it up alongside Kubernetes, Prometheus, Envoy, CoreDNS, containerd, and Fluentd.

Jaeger was developed by ride share company Uber in 2015. The project is inspired by OpenZipkin and Dapper, and meant for monitoring and troubleshooting microservices-based systems. It therefore can be used for tasks such as root cause analysis, distributed transaction monitoring, and service dependency analysis. 

Finding out which component in a containerised application isn’t working properly is quite a challenge and tracing projects like Jaeger are only slowly being picked up by enterprises to tackle that. The project’s graduation can therefore be seen as another sign of container architectures maturing and the gaining of traction associated with that. Helpful features Jaeger has recently gained to further that include support for additional storage backends and alternative instrumentation APIs.

In the over two years the project spent in the foundation’s incubator, Jaeger adopted the CNCF’s code of conduct, defined governance and committer processes, and earned the Core Infrastructure Initiative’s Best Practice Badge. It also recruited maintainers from four different companies and made its way into production in companies such as Ticketmaster, Symantec, Red Hat, and GrafanaLabs, whereby it completed the requirements set for graduating.

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation is part of the Linux Foundation and aims at promoting a vendor-neutral software stack for the creation of scalable applications deployed on public, private, and hybrid clouds. Graduated projects have proven compliance to the policies set by the foundation, which is meant to signal a certain level of stability and trustworthiness to anyone looking into cloud-related open source projects.