avuru obs vs. Jaeger
Jaeger is a mature, CNCF-graduated distributed tracing system. It's a great choice and widely deployed. The difference is scope: Jaeger focuses on traces, while avuru obs treats tracing as one signal among four that share a single store — and adds an eBPF service map that needs no instrumentation.
At a glance
| Jaeger | avuru obs | |
|---|---|---|
| Primary scope | Distributed tracing | Traces, logs, metrics, profiling |
| Instrumentation | OTel/Jaeger SDKs (manual spans) | eBPF auto-discovery + optional OTLP spans |
| Storage | Cassandra, Elasticsearch, Badger, etc. | Single ClickHouse engine for all signals |
| Cross-signal correlation | External (wire up separate tools) | Built in — shared trace_id + resource attributes |
| Ingest | OTLP, Jaeger protocols | Native OTLP (:4318/:4317) |
| Deploy | Collector + query + storage | One Helm chart |
| License | Apache-2.0 (CNCF) | AGPL-3.0 |
Why teams switch
- Get a service map without instrumenting anything. Jaeger shows the traces
your SDKs emit; avuru's
sensorreconstructs the topology from the kernel, so even un-instrumented services appear. See Architecture. - Traces don't live alone. Pivot from a slow span to the correlated logs (and soon metrics/profiles) in the same query, instead of stitching Jaeger to a separate logging stack.
- One thing to operate. No separate trace-storage cluster to size and back up — every signal is in ClickHouse.
How to migrate
Jaeger already speaks OTLP, so this is a one-line change:
- Install avuru obs next to Jaeger.
- Point your OTLP exporter (or the OTel Collector feeding Jaeger) at the avuru
gatewayon:4318/:4317. Keep the Jaeger exporter too, to dual-write while you validate. - Confirm traces land in avuru obs, then retire the Jaeger pipeline.
See the OTLP bridge guide for exact exporter settings.
When Jaeger is the better fit
- You need only tracing and already operate Jaeger happily.
- You depend on a specific Jaeger storage backend or its mature, battle-tested ecosystem and integrations.
- You're not on Linux/Kubernetes where eBPF adds the most value.
:::tip Try it side by side Install in 30 seconds and dual-export one service — you'll see the eBPF map appear next to your existing Jaeger traces. :::