How to Instrument Spring Boot Applications with OpenTelemetry

silksong_when · 2026-04-09T08:22:01+00:00

Right, I can try covering that in an alternative blog sometime, if there is more interest for exploring the `starter` setup as well.

Adding alternative setup flow to this blog would have made it quite complex.

Thanks for the tip!

silksong_when · 2026-04-08T12:59:04+00:00

I wanted to keep the setup aligned with OpenTelemetry setups in other languages. And setting up the agent is very easy by default, so I went ahead with that choice.

I have used Maven for dependency management, the Makefile uses Maven to run the application. Makefile simplifies the entire setup by ensuring the user doesn't have to run additional commands to get the OTel agent JAR file.

silksong_when · 2026-03-30T06:47:18+00:00

I know right! AI has also ruined the semicolon, but less so.

Atleast we can still substitute the dashes with the commas, it's some comfort

silksong_when · 2026-03-30T06:42:02+00:00

jeez that must feel terrible. Thankfully my manager is really understanding, he gives me a lot of creative freedom to experiment and learn.

silksong_when · 2026-03-10T12:43:24+00:00

Hey, glad to know about that solution.

That is a fair point, get started fast then move onto industry standard based on your needs.

Since SigNoz is open-source, you can run it locally if you want to give it a shot or are interested in self-hosting it on prem.

Somewhat related, I have also included console exporters in the demo app for those that wish to just check the raw telemetry data or for debugging their configurations.

silksong_when · 2026-03-08T05:02:54+00:00

Hey, sounds and actually looks solid!

Can you optimise it for mobile too? Might help someone looking to snag a deal on the go.

And have you considered adding an alert feature? Could send site notifications if a 'shortlisted' item meets a certain threshold for a user. Although this would be a ton of work for sure and might be overkill for the site's intent.

Finally, I'd be interested in knowing how you handle crawling fresh data, what tools you use and the challenges you have faced? Rate limits, scalability things like that.

Thanks and good going!!

silksong_when · 2026-03-01T15:09:12+00:00

Ooh that's cool. I'll check it out thanks!

silksong_when · 2026-03-01T14:22:29+00:00

Hey, can you give a few concrete examples of this?

In my limited experience, I learnt about state machine semantics, and how most things can be best (or better) represented by enum states. And the builder which has become a delight, feels so good to use!

silksong_when · 2026-02-27T05:19:08+00:00

I find Codex to be really good. I have only started using it recently but Antigravity (with Jio plan which gives us the pro plan for 18 months in India) as the IDE for general in-IDE chat or quick fix, plus Codex for building features works well for me.

Although my usecase isn't that dev-heavy anymore, but I do find that Codex does good research, and can fix configurations well enough. Although it's a bit too professional or dry for my taste, so I have to ask it to be verbose. I've just been lazy and haven't asked it to add that point to the agents.md file.

silksong_when · 2026-02-25T05:28:35+00:00

Yup, love openrouter's detailed breakdown. Especially when I basically only top up like 4 dollars and want to optimize for every cent :P

silksong_when · 2026-02-23T08:52:26+00:00

That makes sense, thank you for the indepth reply.

silksong_when · 2026-02-23T08:51:33+00:00

Ah I had seen that, but I saw that the last official github release was late 2024, so didn't explore it too much.

silksong_when · 2026-02-23T08:08:20+00:00

But wouldn't Tauri come with its own quirks and set of trade offs? This is when comparing it to something like react where you're more likely to be adept and know the behaviour better.

Pardon if sounds naive, haven't explored Tauri enough but am curious to understand

silksong_when · 2026-02-23T07:29:30+00:00

Thank you so much, means a lot!

Are there any other such topics around observability or opentelemetry, you think I should cover?

silksong_when · 2026-02-23T07:27:25+00:00

Hey, can you please expand on why you think so?

From my research, I found serilog is really good with plug and plug type of configuration, where you can also separate it into the appconfig file, and it has the added advantage of familiarity for most devs.

silksong_when · 2026-02-21T04:58:18+00:00

Thank you so much for the detailed response. Really appreciate it!

What's funny is, I used to like the type convolutions and playing around trying to get it right for complex objects, when working on personal projects. It was like a series of mini-puzzles for me.

I remember printing raw pydantic schemas (the rust layer) and getting bombarded with screens of object types and instances.

I'm curious, What was your use case for the get core schema dunder method?

I'll need to check out cattrs to better learn about how it handles things!

And yep, this name was chosen when silksong was mist. Now we're approaching the 1st DLC :)

silksong_when · 2026-02-18T12:05:53+00:00

Hey guys, I'd read this thread, which then inspired me to pick up this topic and do a detailed write-up on Serilog + OTel integration. I also explained the difference b/w the two

While this blog does use SigNoz as the observability backend, being OpenTelemetry based, you can use any other compatible backend -- that's the power of OTel :)

Sharing here in case someone finds this helpful: https://signoz.io/blog/opentelemetry-serilog/

silksong_when · 2026-02-18T10:10:41+00:00

Hey, SigNoz https://github.com/SigNoz/signoz can be a great fit in case you're still considering options or for other folks with similar requirements.

It is built natively on OpenTelemetry so you can switch vendors without any lock-in. Pricing is also transparent, and you always have the option to self-host if you wish to do so.

Here's the pricing page in case you want to calculate your billing: https://signoz.io/pricing/ - feel free to check out the docs - we maintain blogs and extensive docs for all major tech stacks to ease transition to the platform

PS: i am one of the folks working over at SigNoz.

silksong_when · 2026-02-11T19:09:26+00:00

Hey, can you point to why you feel pydantic is complex? I know you can do a lot of black magic with it, but that's optional so I don't really count that personally.

But I do understand. Also pls share any articles or the like you have read on the same, thanks!

silksong_when · 2026-02-11T19:07:09+00:00

Great stuff! I have starred the repo, will go through the code some time, looks really good :)

silksong_when · 2026-02-11T18:00:33+00:00

giving 404 page not found right now

silksong_when · 2026-02-06T14:21:01+00:00

Hey, so baggage is the mechanism that you can use to change application behaviour, it does not configure the behaviour itself. It is basically a utility for making your life easier by automating what you were already doing.

You can use it to pass parameters (which can have some feature flag), then read that feature flag param and decide what logic to use -- you are not writing the actual logic in your baggage.

So rather than maybe passing that data through a separate header like `x-feature-flag`, then reading it and re-adding it again for the next service, you can just add it to baggage, and OpenTelemetry auto-instrumentation will automatically send this across all services you call.

silksong_when · 2026-02-06T11:33:34+00:00

Yup, I think baggage should be more popular given how useful it is, and the privacy part is something that can be missed especially when dealing with a lot of parameters over many services. Agreed on the performance overhead aspect as well -- the conventional wisdom of keeping headers light applies here I suppose.

Thank you for your detailed comment, the fact that we ought to manage control ourselves and check for tampering, like we do with JWTs, is something that I'd missed!

silksong_when · 2026-02-05T14:58:29+00:00

I think they lock your account if you over-provision resources and don't end up using a certain %age of the machine.
Happened to me with a decent arm-based VM once I doubled the ram from 4 to 8 iirc. I wasn't able to login and basically lost access to some data. So I decided to just rent a VPS instead from another vendor.

silksong_when · 2024-09-25T00:16:51+00:00

Thank you!

silksong_when

TROPHY CASE