Spring Boot 4 OpenTelemetry: From Zero to Full Observability in Minutes

Description

Spring Boot 4 introduces a a really nice addition to the observability story: a dedicated OpenTelemetry starter that lets you export metrics, traces, and logs without pulling in the full Actuator dependency. In this tutorial, I walk you through the new spring-boot-starter-opentelemetry from scratch. You'll learn how to set up a complete observability stack using Docker Compose, visualize everything in Grafana, and connect your logs directly to traces for powerful debugging workflows. As I like to say, "hope is not a production strategy", and this starter makes production-ready observability easier than ever. What You'll Learn ✅ How the new OpenTelemetry starter differs from using Spring Boot Actuator ✅ Setting up the LGTM stack (Loki, Grafana, Tempo, Mimir) with Docker Compose ✅ Viewing traces and metrics in Grafana out of the box ✅ Adding custom metrics using @Observed annotations ✅ Configuring log export via OTLP (new in Spring Boot 4.0.1) ✅ Connecting logs to traces for seamless debugging Resources 🔗 Source Code: https://github.com/danvega/ot 🔗 Spring Boot 4 Repo: https://github.com/danvega/sb4 🔗 Road to GA Blog Post: https://spring.io/blog/2025/11/18/opentelemetry-with-spring-boot 🔗 Spring Office Hours with Brian Clozel: https://spring-office-hours.transistor.fm/episodes/s4e34-opentelemetry-with-spring-boot 👋🏻Connect with me: Website: https://www.danvega.dev Twitter: https://twitter.com/therealdanvega Github: https://github.com/danvega LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danvega Newsletter: https://www.danvega.dev/newsletter SUBSCRIBE TO MY CHANNEL: http://bit.ly/2re4GH0 ❤️