Service Foundry
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Young Gyu Kim <credemol@gmail.com>

Grafana Integration with Jaeger for Distributed Tracing

grafana integration with jaeger

Overview

This guide provides a step-by-step walkthrough on integrating Grafana with Jaeger to visualize and monitor distributed traces. It covers:

  • Establishing a connection to Jaeger from Grafana

  • Exploring trace data within Grafana

  • Building custom dashboards for trace visualization

Benefits of Integrating Jaeger with Grafana

  • Unified Trace Visualization: Grafana offers a centralized interface to visualize Jaeger traces, enabling deeper insights into distributed systems.

  • No Need for Jaeger UI: Access trace data directly in Grafana, eliminating the need to expose the Jaeger UI via Ingress or configure SSO for Jaeger.

  • Customizable Dashboards: Create dashboards tailored to your application’s tracing needs.

  • Proactive Monitoring: Leverage Grafana’s alerting system to generate alerts based on trace metrics.

Step 1: Connect Grafana to Jaeger

  1. In Grafana, go to Connections > Add new connection

  2. Search for and select Jaeger as the data source

  3. Click Add new data source

  4. Provide the following details:

  5. Click Save & Test to validate the connection

grafana data sources
Figure 1. Grafana UI - Data Source Configuration

Step 2: Create a Dashboard for Trace Visualization

  1. Navigate to Dashboards and Click 'New > New dashboard'

  2. Click 'Add visualization'

  3. Select 'o11y-jaeger' as the data source

  4. Choose 'Search' for the query type and select 'otel-spring-example' or your own application as the service.

  5. Input 'otel-spring-example traces' for Title

  6. Click 'Save dashboard' and provide a name for the dashboard for example 'Traces - Java applications' and click 'Save'

grafana dashboard configuration
Figure 2. Grafana UI - Jaeger Trace Panel Configuration

Access the dashboard from the Dashboards menu to view and analyze trace data.

grafana jaeger dashboard
Figure 3. Grafana UI - Jaeger Trace Dashboard

Step 3: Explore Traces in Grafana

  1. Go to Data sources

  2. Click Explore next to the o11y-jaeger data source

  3. Select Search as the query type

  4. Choose your application (e.g., otel-spring-example) as the service

  5. Set Min Duration to filter traces, for example, 3.0s for traces longer than 3 seconds

  6. Click Run query to display matching traces

grafana explore jaeger search
Figure 4. Grafana UI - Explore Jaeger Traces

Click on a trace to drill down into its spans, durations, and metadata.

grafana explore trace details
Figure 5. Grafana UI - Trace Detail View

Conclusion

Integrating Jaeger with Grafana enables comprehensive trace visualization without additional UI or authentication overhead. This integration provides a seamless observability experience by centralizing trace data within Grafana, enhancing the ability to monitor, diagnose, and optimize distributed applications.

You can also view this document in web format at: https://nsalexamy.github.io/service-foundry/pages/documents/o11y-foundry/grafana-jaeger-integration/