Securing Jaeger Installation

Version 1.60 Latest

This page documents the existing security mechanisms in Jaeger, organized by the pairwise connections between Jaeger components. We ask for community help with implementing additional security measures (see issue-1718 ).

SDK to Agent

jaeger-agent is deprecated . The OpenTelemetry data can be sent from the OpenTelemetry SDKs (equipped with OTLP exporters) directly to jaeger-collector. Alternatively, use the OpenTelemetry Collector as a local agent.

Deployments that involve jaeger-agent are meant for trusted environments where the agent is run as a sidecar within the container’s network namespace, or as a host agent. Therefore, there is currently no support for traffic encryption between clients and agents.

❌ Sending trace data over UDP - no TLS/authentication.
❌ Retrieving sampling configuration via HTTP - no TLS/authentication.

SDK to Collector

OpenTelemetry SDKs can be configured to communicate directly with jaeger-collector via gRPC or HTTP, with optional TLS enabled.

✅ HTTP - TLS with mTLS (client cert authentication) supported.
✅ gRPC - TLS with mTLS (client cert authentication) supported.
- Covers both span export and sampling configuration querying.

Agent to Collector

jaeger-agent is deprecated .

✅ gRPC - TLS with client cert authentication supported.

Collector/Ingester/Query-Service to Storage

✅ Cassandra - TLS with mTLS (client cert authentication) supported.
✅ Elasticsearch - TLS with mTLS (client cert authentication) supported; bearer token propagation.
✅ Kafka - TLS with various authentication mechanisms supported (mTLS, Kerberos, plaintext).

Browser to UI

❌ HTTP - no TLS; bearer token authentication (pass-through to storage).
- Blog post: Protecting Jaeger UI with an OAuth sidecar Proxy .
- Blog post: Secure architecture for Jaeger with Apache httpd reverse proxy on OpenShift .

Consumers to Query Service

✅ HTTP - TLS with mTLS (client cert authentication) supported.
✅ gRPC - TLS with mTLS (client cert authentication) supported.