Spring Boot starter

You can use two options to instrument Spring Boot applications with OpenTelemetry.

  1. The default choice for instrumenting Spring Boot applications is the OpenTelemetry Java agent with bytecode instrumentation:
    • More out of the box instrumentation than the OpenTelemetry starter
  2. The OpenTelemetry Spring Boot starter can help you with:
    • Spring Boot Native image applications for which the OpenTelemetry Java agent does not work
    • Startup overhead of the OpenTelemetry Java agent exceeding your requirements
    • A Java monitoring agent already used because the OpenTelemetry Java agent might not work with the other agent
    • Spring Boot configuration files (application.properties, application.yml) to configure the OpenTelemetry Spring Boot starter which doesn’t work with the OpenTelemetry Java agent

Getting started with the Spring Boot starter

SDK configuration

Configure the SDK with the OpenTelemetry starter

Out of the box instrumentation

Out of the box instrumentation for the starter

Additional instrumentation

Instrumentations in addition to the out of the box instrumentation of the starter

Annotations

Using instrumentation annotations with the Spring starter.

Other Spring autoconfiguration

Spring autoconfiguration without the OpenTelemetry Spring starter