jaeger

Jaeger is the English rendering of the German word Jäger, meaning hunter. In English-language texts the spelling Jaeger is common, while the original German uses the umlaut over the a. The term appears in various proper names and cultural references.

As a surname and in brands, Jaeger is found in German and Central European lineages and has been adopted in some English-language company names. The word’s association with hunting and German heritage informs its usage in branding and identity, and it appears in various personal and corporate names in Europe and beyond.

In popular culture, Jaeger denotes the giant piloted fighting machines in the film Pacific Rim and its sequels, where crews operate the biomechanical weapons to combat monstrous creatures. The term has become part of the franchise’s fictional universe and design vocabulary.

In software, Jaeger is an open-source distributed tracing system originally developed by Uber Technologies. It enables end-to-end tracing of requests across microservices and is a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) project, supporting OpenTracing and OpenTelemetry integrations. Jaeger is widely used to monitor application performance, diagnose latency issues, and visualize request flows in complex service architectures.