title: Get Jaeger agent error when distributed trace spans Node.js and Java services
body: <p>In our application a Node.js front end talks to a Java Spring backend.  Everything is containerized and running in Kubernetes.  Some time ago we added support for Jaeger distribtued tracing across the front end and back end services.  Jaeger has been running fine until recently.</p>
  
  <p>Our Elasticsearch cluster was out of date so we upgraded.  That mandated an upgrade of Jaeger--we ended up with the following bits:</p>
  
  <pre><code>Jaeger Helm Chart: 0.13.3  from https://github.com/helm/charts/tree/master/incubator/jaeger
  Jaeger Client for Node: 3.17.1
  Jaeger Client for Java:
     opentracing-spring-jaeger-cloud-starter 2.0.3
     opentracing-spring-jaeger-web-starter 2.0.3
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Both of the opentracing libraries have a dependency on the version 0.35.1 of the Jaeger Java client.</p>
  
  <p>Since upgrading, traces that are created on one side or the other seem to be fine.  But traces that span the boundary (i.e. start on the Node.js front end and complete on the Java backend) generate errors in the jaeger-agent pod like this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>{"level":"error","ts":1574224941.7531824,"caller":"processors/thrift_processor.go:119",
  "msg":"Processor failed","error":"*jaeger.Batch error reading struct: *jaeger.Span error
   reading struct: *jaeger.Log error reading struct: *jaeger.Tag error reading struct: 
  error reading field 3: Invalid data length","stacktrace":"github.com/jaegertracing/jaeger/cmd/agent/app/processors.
  (*ThriftProcessor).processBuffer\n\t/home/travis/gopath/src/github.com/jaegertracing/jaeger/cmd/
  agent/app/processors/thrift_processor.go:119\ngithub.com/jaegertracing/jaeger/cmd/agent/app/proc
  essors.NewThriftProcessor.func2\n\t/home/travis/gopath/src/github.com/jaegertracing/jaeger/cmd/a
  gent/app/processors/thrift_processor.go:83"}
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>For these traces, the Jaeger UI shows us the spans that were created by the front end before invoking the backend API, but the child backend spans do not show up as you would expect.</p>
  
  <p>What might cause this sort of processor error?</p>