Advantage of opentracing/jaeger over APM tracing capabilities

Question

I was looking at APM tools. Essentially Dynatrace and I could see that it also provides tracing capabilities that seem to be language agnostic and also without code modifications.

Where would jaeger/open tracing be a better option than a tool like dynatrace?

Yes, dynatrace (or others like Elastic APM) is capable of providing a lot more insight into an application other than tracing.

But just from tracing perspective... What advantages or capabilities does jaeger have that are better than APM tooling or not available in APMs. ONLY from the tracing perspective.

Halden

Have you found an answer since? To me the answer is none... Except for the fact that it's open source and free to use. That can be quite a big argument, because APM tools like ECE APM, Dynatrace, Appdynamics etc are all very expensive. – Eulogia

Answer 1

As you said, dynatrace can provide more insights, but obviously that comes with a price tag.

A Jaeger/openTracing solution

• can be up and running very quickly
• provides quality insights into performance/bottlenecks in your execution paths
• having the source code available is very useful if you want to customize any part of the process (for example i added some code to use a different message queue)

I would add that dynatrace is a great tool, but it is a full APM tool, so provides a wide variety of insights, and its expensive. Jaeger focusses on the tracing aspect and for an open source, free tool, it does a very good job.

Rung