Jaeger insights

In Jaeger v2 (OTEL-based), when otelcol_receiver_accepted_spans increases but otelcol_exporter_sent_spans does not match the rate, spans are being lost in the processing pipeline between reception and storage.

Incorrect sampling configuration (especially default 1-in-1000 in legacy Jaeger SDKs) causes most traces to be dropped at the client, creating observability gaps that appear as missing spans in the backend.

When Jaeger collector's internal queue exceeds 70-80% capacity, spans begin queueing and risk being dropped, resulting in incomplete traces and data loss.

Trace Completion Rate Degradationcritical

When the ratio of saved traces to received spans drops below 95%, traces are being lost before storage, indicating storage backend issues, network timeouts, or collector resource constraints.

Storage Backend Write Latency Bottleneckcritical

Slow storage write operations block collector workers, causing span reception to slow and queues to back up, ultimately leading to dropped traces.

Query Service Latency Degradationwarning

High P95/P99 query latencies (>5 seconds) make Jaeger UI unusable during incident troubleshooting, typically caused by slow storage reads, overloaded shards, or inefficient trace queries.

Observability Blind Spots in Multi-Agent Tracescritical

Distributed agent architectures require trace correlation across multiple context windows and parallel execution paths. Without proper instrumentation, teams lose visibility into subagent activities, making root cause analysis impossible when investigations fail.

Container Networking Misconfiguration Blocking Span Receptioncritical

Network namespace issues prevent spans from reaching Jaeger collectors, manifesting as zero spans received despite applications generating traces. Common in Docker/Kubernetes deployments.

Kubectl Logs Volatility Loses Critical Troubleshooting Datawarning

Relying solely on kubectl logs for troubleshooting loses critical data when containers restart, pods are evicted, or nodes fail. Log files stored on node local disk are rotated out or permanently lost, impeding incident investigation.

Active Tracing for Latency Root Causeinfo

Kong's Active Tracing (now Konnect Debugger) provides OpenTelemetry-compatible traces showing exact plugin execution time, phase durations, and upstream latency breakdown—revealing bottlenecks invisible to external APM tools.