JCON EUROPE 2023

OpenTelemetry is a collection of standards and tools to make it easy to get metrics, distributed traces, and logs out of applications.

As OpenTelemetry is a vendor-neutral project owned by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), instrumenting applications with OpenTelemetry ensures that you produce telemetry data in standard OTLP format that can be consumed by any modern monitoring backend.

The Java ecosystem provides a variety of options how to instrument applications for OpenTelemetry monitoring. Spring Boot 3 comes with a brand new Observation API that integrates metrics and distributed tracing. The OpenTelemetry community offer a very mature Java instrumentation library. Other projects like Prometheus offer out-of-the-box integration with OpenTelemetry.

This talk gives an overview of the state of the OpenTelemetry support in the Java ecosystem. We show what works out-of-the-box, how to extend out-of-the-box behavior with custom data, and how to set up a pipeline for monitoring Java applications with OpenTelemetry.