Microservices Observability with Spring Boot and OpenTelemetry
Distributed systems fail in distributed ways. OpenTelemetry provides a unified standard for traces, metrics, and logs that Spring Boot 3.4 integrates natively through Micrometer.
Zero-Code Instrumentation
<dependency>
<groupId>io.micrometer</groupId>
<artifactId>micrometer-tracing-bridge-otel</artifactId>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupId>io.opentelemetry</groupId>
<artifactId>opentelemetry-exporter-otlp</artifactId>
</dependency>
Spring auto-instruments HTTP requests, database queries, message queue operations, and RestClient calls. Every request gets a trace ID that propagates across services.
Custom Business Spans
@Observed(name = "order.process", contextualName = "process-order")
public Order processOrder(OrderRequest request) {
Order order = createOrder(request);
paymentService.charge(order);
inventoryService.reserve(order);
return order;
}
Grafana Stack Integration
Export to Grafana Tempo (traces), Prometheus (metrics), and Loki (logs) for a complete observability pipeline. Correlate a slow API response to the exact database query causing it — across 15 microservices — in seconds.