Jaeger-Query is a critical service within the Jaeger ecosystem, designed to retrieve and visualize Distributed-Tracing data. It serves as the primary User-Interface and API gateway for accessing spans and traces stored in the Storage-Backend. By connecting to databases such as Elasticsearch, Cassandra, or Badger, Jaeger-Query enables developers to perform complex searches based on service names, operation types, and custom tags.
The service hosts a React-based web application that provides a graphical representation of request timelines, helping teams identify latency bottlenecks in Microservices architectures. As detailed in the Official Jaeger Documentation, Jaeger-Query can also generate Dependency-Graph visualizations to illustrate the relationships between different services in a cluster. It supports GRPC and HTTP protocols for data retrieval, ensuring compatibility with modern Cloud-Native environments.
In a typical deployment, Jaeger-Query is configured to run alongside Jaeger-Collector, which handles the ingestion of data, while the query service focuses on the read path. This separation of concerns allows for independent scaling of ingestion and retrieval workloads. For advanced analysis, Jaeger-Query can be integrated with Grafana to provide unified Observability dashboards.