Add OpenTelemetry Tracing to Spring Boot in Ten Minutes

What You Need

Three things are enough: a Spring Boot 3.x app (3.2+ ships Micrometer Tracing, which saves half the setup), an OpenTelemetry Collector (run one in Docker to receive and forward traces to Jujing), and your Jujing endpoint and token.

Step 1: Add Dependencies

Add two dependencies to Maven:

<dependency>
  <groupId>io.micrometer</groupId>
  <artifactId>micrometer-tracing-bridge-otel</artifactId>
</dependency>
<dependency>
  <groupId>io.opentelemetry</groupId>
  <artifactId>opentelemetry-exporter-otlp</artifactId>
</dependency>

Spring Boot 3.2+ auto-configures tracing through the actuator, so you don't instantiate a Tracer by hand or write span-export logic yourself.

Step 2: Configure application.yml

spring:
  application:
    name: order-service
management:
  tracing:
    sampling:
      probability: 1.0
  otlp:
    tracing:
      endpoint: http://localhost:4318/v1/traces

spring.application.name becomes the service.name automatically, which is what you filter by when debugging. probability: 1.0 means 100% sampling — fine locally, but drop it to 0.1–0.3 in production. The endpoint points at the Collector's HTTP port 4318.

Step 3: Start the Collector and Verify

otel-collector-config.yaml:

receivers:
  otlp:
    protocols:
      http:
        endpoint: 0.0.0.0:4318
exporters:
  otlphttp:
    endpoint: https://ob.jjhub.cn/v1/traces
    headers:
      Authorization: Bearer <token>
service:
  pipelines:
    traces:
      receivers: [otlp]
      exporters: [otlphttp]

Start it: docker run -v $PWD/otel-collector-config.yaml:/etc/otelcol/config.yaml otel/opentelemetry-collector-contrib

Hit your endpoints a few times, open the Trace list in Jujing, filter by service.name, and you'll see the full call chain. Click a span to inspect its duration, status code, and custom attributes.

Custom Spans and Going Further

Framework instrumentation covers HTTP, databases, and messaging, but business-critical steps need manual spans. Inject the Tracer and wrap key methods like placing an order or deducting inventory:

Span span = tracer.nextSpan().name("place_order").start();
try (var scope = tracer.withSpan(span)) {
    span.setTag("txn_id", txnId);
    // business logic
} finally {
    span.end();
}

In production, offload sampling to the Collector with tail-based sampling: keep every trace slower than 500ms or with errors, sample the rest by ratio. That protects storage without missing the traces that matter.

Common Pitfalls

• No data at all: check the port — 4318 is HTTP, 4317 is gRPC; both ends must agree.
• Only single-span traces: the traceparent header isn't being forwarded downstream. Make sure RestTemplate/WebClient use the auto-configured versions and headers propagate across services.
• service.name shows "unknown": you forgot spring.application.name.
• Sampling overloads storage: 1.0 is fine locally; start production at 0.1 and watch storage growth before raising it.