Jaeger agent is no longer available

[yurishkuro]

Per jaegertracing/jaeger#4739, we removed the jaeger-agent binary/image from the distribution.

This will require changes in the Operator, either by removing support for the host agent / side car, or configuring OTEL Collector in that capacity.

In the documentation PR jaegertracing/documentation#757 I did not change the Operator page just yet, pending the resolution here. I'd prefer operator maintainers to make those changes.

cc @frzifus @pavolloffay

[pavolloffay]

hi @yurishkuro

is there any reason why the agent was removed from Jaeger? The last time we talked about it the conclusion was to keep it around since it does not incur a maintenance burden.

Would it be possible to bring it back until Jaeger V1 is supported? We are planning to support Jaeger v1 with operator until ~end of 2025 with all the v1 functionality. If Jaeger removes v1 we would like to have a maintenance branch to apply CVE fixes at least.

This will require changes in the Operator, either by removing support for the host agent / side car, or configuring OTEL Collector in that capacity.

This is certainly possible however it will bring breaking changes. Eg. there is no clear migration of flags to otel config. And also other fields from the CR would need to change https://github.com/jaegertracing/jaeger-operator/blob/main/apis/v1/jaeger_types.go#L516

[yurishkuro]

We announced deprecation of agent more than a year ago. Only people using Jaeger SDKs (deprecated and unmaintained for more than 2yrs) can actually benefit from the agent (OTEL SDKs removed UDP exporters). It feels to me that if the existing users were ok with getting no security updates for SDKs for 2yrs, they should be ok with running v1.62 agent for a year, without us having to publish new versions.

[yurishkuro]

W.r.t. the operator changes, rather than freezing the version of the operator, I would suggest freezing the version of the agent it uses.