Managed Jaeger Hosting — production-ready from $15 a month
Distributed tracing for microservices. Deployed on your own dedicated instance in AWS, Azure, or GCP, kept patched, backed up, and monitored by ManageStacks — standard Jaeger, no lock-in.
Jaeger is a CNCF-graduated distributed tracing system originally built by Uber for monitoring microservice architectures. ManageStacks provides managed Jaeger hosting with production-ready storage backends and zero operational overhead.
What does Jaeger do, and why do teams deploy it?
Jaeger is a distributed tracing platform that helps developers monitor and troubleshoot complex microservice architectures. Originally developed at Uber and now a graduated project of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, Jaeger captures end-to-end request flows across services, making it possible to pinpoint latency bottlenecks, trace error propagation, and understand service dependencies.
With support for OpenTelemetry and multiple storage backends including Elasticsearch and Cassandra, Jaeger fits into modern cloud-native stacks. Its powerful query interface, service dependency graphs, and trace comparison features give engineering teams the tools they need to maintain performance and reliability at scale.
- End-to-end distributed trace collection and visualization
- Service dependency graph and topology mapping
- Trace comparison for performance regression analysis
- Native OpenTelemetry and OpenTracing support
- Adaptive sampling to control trace volume
- Multiple storage backend options including Elasticsearch
Distributed tracing for microservices
What does managed Jaeger hosting cost?
Flat per-app pricing, in your chosen AWS, Azure, or GCP region. No per-user pricing — a busy deployment costs the same as a quiet one.
Starter
Staging and internal tools. Dedicated instance, TLS, daily backups, managed upgrades.
Standard
Production workloads. Adds monitoring, staging environment, region choice, priority support.
Business
High-traffic and compliance workloads. Adds a high-availability replica and same-day support.
24×7 SRE retainer
Round-the-clock on-call across every hosted application, for teams that need a pager answered at 3am.
Self-hosting Jaeger vs managed — what does it really cost?
The software is free. The engineer-hours are not.
Running it yourself
- Deploying the Jaeger collector, query service, and storage backend (Elasticsearch or Cassandra) as separate components with manual network configuration between them
- Sizing and tuning Elasticsearch clusters for trace storage — getting index lifecycle policies, shard counts, and retention rules wrong leads to either spiraling costs or lost trace data
- Configuring OpenTelemetry SDKs across dozens of microservices to export traces to the correct collector endpoint with proper sampling rates and retry policies
- Running out of disk space on the storage backend because trace volume spikes during incidents — exactly when you need tracing the most
- Losing the ability to correlate traces across services when the collector goes down, turning distributed debugging back into a guessing game across log files
On ManageStacks
- ManageStacks deploys the Jaeger collector, query UI, and storage backend as a coordinated system with health checks and automatic service discovery pre-configured
- Storage is provisioned with sensible index lifecycle policies, retention rules, and auto-scaling storage volumes that grow with your trace volume instead of running out during incidents
- A standardized OTLP endpoint is exposed within your VPC, giving every service a single, consistent address to send traces to without per-service collector configuration
- Automated storage management handles index rotation, old trace cleanup, and capacity alerts — you set the retention period, ManageStacks handles the rest
- High-availability collector deployment with load balancing ensures traces are captured even during traffic spikes and infrastructure failures
Jaeger on ManageStacks vs the alternatives
Compare self-hosted Jaeger on ManageStacks against commercial APM platforms and unmanaged open-source tracing deployments.
| ManageStacks + JaegerUs | Datadog APM | Grafana Tempo (Cloud) | DIY self-hosted Jaeger | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Annual cost (mid-scale) | $348/yr + storage compute | $4,000–50,000+/yr | Usage-based ($0.50/GB) | Cloud compute + storage costs |
| Data ownership | Your own cloud account | Datadog-managed | Grafana-managed | Your own infrastructure |
| Trace retention | Configurable (days to months) | 15 days default | 30 days default | Configurable |
| Setup time | Under 15 minutes | Instant (SaaS) | Instant (SaaS) | 6–12 hours |
| OpenTelemetry support | Native OTLP ingestion | OTLP via Datadog Agent | Native OTLP | Native OTLP ingestion |
| Maintenance | Managed (scaling, backups, index lifecycle) | None (vendor-managed) | None (vendor-managed) | All on your team (Elasticsearch ops, scaling, backups) |
Provisioning, upgrades, backups and monitoring on your team’s plate.
What does running Jaeger yourself involve?
ManageStacks takes care of provisioning storage backends, scaling collectors, and maintaining Jaeger so your team can focus on tracing issues rather than operating the tracing platform.
Jaeger key numbers
How long from subscribing to a live instance?
Connect your cloud account
Grant ManageStacks deploy access to your AWS, Azure, or GCP account. The Jaeger stack deploys into a private VPC with the collector, query service, and storage backend on separate security groups.
Choose your storage backend and retention policy
Select Elasticsearch or OpenSearch as your trace storage engine and define how long traces should be retained. ManageStacks provisions the cluster with appropriate shard counts and index lifecycle policies for your expected trace volume.
Configure trace ingestion endpoints
ManageStacks exposes OTLP and Jaeger-native endpoints inside your VPC. Point your OpenTelemetry SDKs, Jaeger agents, or application instrumentation to the provided collector address — no public internet exposure required.
Start tracing and querying
Open the Jaeger Query UI to search traces by service, operation, duration, and tags. ManageStacks handles collector scaling, storage maintenance, and index management while your team focuses on understanding system behavior.
When is self-hosting Jaeger the right answer instead?
“Managed hosting is not always the correct call.”
Self-host when a platform team already runs the infrastructure and on-call rotation to operate Jaeger at genuinely low marginal cost. Self-host when compliance requires an air-gapped or on-premises deployment that no hosted option can satisfy. And self-host when the deployment depends on heavy customisation with a fast internal build-deploy loop, because an internal release process will beat any managed change process.
For everyone else — teams whose engineers have better things to do than shepherd upgrades — managed hosting is cheaper than the hours it replaces.
Which cloud should Jaeger run on — AWS, Azure or GCP?
For most workloads, the choice of cloud matters less than proximity: run Jaeger in the same cloud and region as the applications and data it talks to, because every request between them adds a round trip. The underlying compute performs equivalently across AWS, Azure, and GCP.
In practice, an existing cloud footprint decides it. All plans support all three clouds, and moving regions later is a scheduled migration, not a rebuild.
Deepest managed-service catalog, default when there's no existing footprint
Best fit for teams already on Microsoft 365 or Entra ID
Strongest for data/analytics-adjacent workloads
Every plan supports AWS, Azure, and GCP — region choice included.
Common questions about Jaeger on ManageStacks
Which storage backend does ManageStacks use for Jaeger?
ManageStacks configures Jaeger with Elasticsearch by default for production-grade performance and scalability. Alternative backends can be arranged depending on your plan and requirements.
Can I integrate Jaeger on ManageStacks with my existing OpenTelemetry setup?
Yes. Jaeger natively supports the OpenTelemetry protocol. ManageStacks exposes the collector endpoints securely, so you can point your existing OTel SDKs and agents directly at your managed Jaeger instance.
How does ManageStacks handle Jaeger upgrades and scaling?
ManageStacks manages Jaeger version upgrades with zero-downtime rollouts and scales collector and query components independently based on your trace volume and query patterns.
Run Jaeger without carrying the pager
Subscribe through your AWS, Azure, or GCP marketplace. We handle provisioning, SSL, monitoring, backups, updates, and security. From $15/mo.