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Jaeger

INFRA · APIS
Velocity3.8

End-to-end distributed tracing platform for microservices

Jaeger folds its MCP server into the query service and drops Elasticsearch 6

mcptrace-summarieselasticsearchclickhousebreaking-changes
Current state
Jaeger's 2.x line is releasing roughly monthly, and two threads dominate. The storage layer is being modernised and pruned — Elasticsearch 6 support removed, rotation and index-cleaner feature gates promoted to beta, ClickHouse gaining TLS and analyzer fixes, configurable max trace duration. The other thread is the query surface: a lightweight trace-summaries endpoint added in 2.19 then given a native Elasticsearch implementation in 2.20, and the MCP extension merged into the query extension.
Where it's heading
Jaeger is treating machine consumption of traces as a first-class query path rather than an add-on. Merging jaegermcp into jaegerquery means the MCP surface ships wherever query ships, and trace summaries give both the UI and any agent a cheap way to scan results before pulling full traces. On storage, the direction is fewer supported backends maintained better, with ClickHouse steadily gaining parity.
Prediction
Expect the trace-summaries path to become the default for search across storage backends, and further ClickHouse feature work as the Elasticsearch surface is trimmed rather than extended.

Recent moves

  1. 14d ago

    MCP merges into the query service; Elasticsearch 6 support removed

    ⚡ SPARK

    The most consequential release in this window on both axes: the MCP extension stops being separate and becomes part of jaegerquery, while Elasticsearch 6 is dropped and rotation and index-cleaner gates reach beta. Native trace summaries land here too, completing the lightweight-search path started in 2.19.

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  2. 2mo ago

    Lightweight trace-summaries endpoint arrives in the v3 API

    A new GET /api/v3/trace-summaries endpoint plus a matching gRPC handler introduce cheap search results that do not require fetching whole traces. This is the groundwork that 2.20 later backs with a native Elasticsearch implementation, and ClickHouse picks up TLS configuration in the same release.

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  3. 2mo ago

    Header forwarding to storage backends and UI base-path autodetection

    Configurable header forwarding to Elasticsearch, OpenSearch and gRPC storage backends is the substantive addition, useful for multi-tenant and auth-proxied deployments. The MCP tidying here — normalising span_kind input, removing a non-standard health tool — shows the extension being groomed before its merge into query.

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  4. 4mo ago

    Clock-skew and jitter fixes; metrics storage exposed to the UI

    A fix-heavy release whose useful additions are exposing metrics-storage capabilities to the UI and safer self-tracing through the OTEL collector telemetry factory. The clock-skew adjuster and jitter panic guards are the kind of correctness work that only surfaces at scale.

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  5. 4mo ago

    Legacy remote-sampling response format removed; Go 1.25.7 required

    Two breaking cleanups — the legacy remote sampling response format is gone and Go version consistency is enforced across the codebase — alongside query-service max trace size support and an empty span name sanitizer. Pruning rather than building, consistent with the storage trimming that follows.

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  6. 5mo ago

    Patch: default span kind in operations endpoint

    A two-item patch defaulting spanKind in the v3 operations endpoint and removing a deprecated protobuf wrapper. Notable only as the quiet baseline before the storage and query work picks up.

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