Comment by jpkrohling_jpk

Jaeger is just the concrete implementation. OpenTracing is what you should think about using when writing your application. That said, you could benefit from automatic instrumentation via OpenTracing framework integration libraries (JAX-RS, Servlets, ...). Or use the Java Agent. But in the end, I think there is value in manually instrumenting your code, specially around your business transactions. This way, you can monitor your business metrics, instead of "http requests" or "cpu load".