The assistant runs through an agent you supply
Jaeger’s maintainers presented an experimental trace-troubleshooting assistant on November 10 at KubeCon. The preview adds a chat interface for investigating distributed traces, the records that follow requests across services. Jaeger also exposes trace tools through the Model Context Protocol. Its documentation says those tools can operate independently of the chat assistant.
The assistant needs an agent that supports the Agent Client Protocol. Operators run that agent and connect it to Jaeger. Jaeger’s documentation says the project supplies neither the agent nor a model provider. For an evaluation, the team needs to decide where that agent runs and how it handles the trace information it receives.
Use the trace as the evidence
The maintainers say the interface can show which tools the assistant called as it investigated. CGH’s assessment is that an engineer can use those calls to find the relevant spans and compare the explanation with the underlying telemetry. The preview also adds a view for generative AI activity recorded using OpenTelemetry conventions. What the view can display depends on which signals the application sends.
Jaeger is publicly available under Apache 2.0. The November 10 event was a preview announcement, and the project’s 2.23 release record predates it. The sources give no country-by-country rollout or separate Jaeger fee. Agent hosting or model usage may carry their own costs. CGH reviewed the documentation without deploying the assistant.