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A seamless transition: Migrate your service mesh observability from Jaeger to OpenTelemetry

Learning path | 6 resources | 1 hr and 35 mins | Published on February 16, 2026
Michaela Lang

Learn how to migrate your service mesh observability to OpenTelemetry to ensure your instrumentation is unified and future-proofed.

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  1. Overview: A seamless transition: Migrate your service mesh observability from Jaeger to OpenTelemetry
  2. Requirements for Jaeger to OpenTelemetry transition Page | 5 mins
  3. Create the Jaegar instance and subscribe to Tempo Page | 20 mins
  4. Set up OpenTelemetry Page | 20 mins
  5. Create the service mesh control planes Page | 20 mins
  6. Migrate your OpenShift Service Mesh to OpenTelemetry Page | 30 mins

Overview: A seamless transition: Migrate your service mesh observability from Jaeger to OpenTelemetry

Feature image for Red Hat OpenShift

The evolution of microservices architectures, particularly those leveraging Red Hat OpenShift Service Mesh, has amplified the need for a unified, vendor-agnostic observability framework. While Jaeger has been a reliable cornerstone for distributed tracing, the industry is rapidly consolidating around the OpenTelemetry (OTEL) standard.

Migrating your service mesh's tracing infrastructure from Jaeger is a crucial step since Jaeger will not receive any updates in the OpenShift operator catalogs. This shift not only centralizes your telemetry (traces, metrics, and logs) but also leverages the power of the OpenTelemetry Collector to maintain seamless visibility during the transition. It also guarantees continued updates for the foreseeable future.

Prerequisites:

  • Red Hat console access
  • Red Hat OpenShift Service Mesh
  • OpenTelemetry

In this learning path, you will:

  • Create a Jaeger instance for demonstration purposes.
  • Set up a service mesh control plane.
  • Configure and transition to OpenTelemetry.

Why migrate? The OTEL advantage

The move to OpenTelemetry (OTEL) offers compelling architectural and operational benefits such as:

  1. Vendor-agnostic instrumentation: OTEL provides a single set of APIs, SDKs, and instrumentation libraries that produce standardized telemetry data. This eliminates vendor lock-in and allows you to switch tracing backends (including Jaeger, Grafana Tempo, or commercial solutions) simply by reconfiguring the Collector, not by rewriting application code.
  2. Unified telemetry: OTEL natively supports the collection and correlation of traces, metrics, and logs. Unlike Jaeger, which is trace-centric, OTEL allows you to adopt a holistic observability strategy from a single instrumentation source.
  3. Future-proofing: Jaeger now formally recommends and supports OTEL instrumentation. By migrating, you align with the Cloud Native Computing Foundation standard and its vibrant, rapidly developing ecosystem.

Additionally, consider following the recommendations from Best practices to migrate from Jaeger to OpenTelemetry by Pavol Loffay and Jamie Parker.

In this learning path, we will walk through how to create a Jaeger instance, then migrate it to OTEL.