Fault Tolerance in Distributed Systems: Tracing with Apache Kafka and Jaeger | Confluent

This post introduces a pattern for making distributed tracing solutions (specifically Jaeger) more fault-tolerant by using Apache Kafka as an intermediary for trace data. Instead of applications sending trace spans directly to Jaeger, they send them to a Kafka topic. A separate application then consumes from this topic and forwards the spans to Jaeger. This ensures that trace data is not lost if Jaeger is unavailable and provides continuous tracing insight during downtime. The implementation involves custom Jaeger sender and consumer configurations.