Observability Java 25 · Spring Boot 4.1.1

Spring Boot Observability with OpenTelemetry

Submodule: actuator-observability-opentelemetry

This tutorial demonstrates how to instrument a Spring Boot application with OpenTelemetry to generate traces and export them.

Dependencies

To enable OpenTelemetry in our application, we will need to add the following dependencies:

implementation("org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-starter-web")
implementation("org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-starter-actuator")
implementation("io.micrometer:micrometer-tracing-bridge-otel")
implementation("io.opentelemetry:opentelemetry-exporter-otlp")

With these dependencies, Spring Boot Actuator and Micrometer Tracing will automatically configure OpenTelemetry to generate and export traces.

Configuration

By default, the OTLP exporter will attempt to send traces to an endpoint. Let’s configure it in our properties:

management.tracing.sampling.probability=1.0
management.otlp.tracing.endpoint=http://localhost:4318/v1/traces

management.tracing.sampling.probability=1.0 ensures that all traces are captured. management.otlp.tracing.endpoint sets the OTLP HTTP endpoint.

Conclusion

With Micrometer Tracing and OpenTelemetry, Spring Boot application observability is made easy with just a few dependencies and properties.