Jaeger is an open-source distributed tracing platform developed by Uber and adopted by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, designed to enhance observability in microservice-based systems. It helps track requests across complex architectures by propagating identifiers through multiple microservices, thereby simplifying debugging and performance analysis. With support for Kubernetes and the OpenTelemetry standard, Jaeger allows for flexible instrumentation and the ability to switch tracing solutions without reworking application code. It provides various deployment options, including an all-in-one container for demonstrations and a more resilient distributed setup for production environments, while offering configurable sampling rates to manage processing and storage overhead efficiently.