Explore seamless Jaeger integration with Spring Cloud for streamlined application monitoring and enhanced performance. Learn how to leverage distributed tracing capabilities for efficient microservices management.

1. Jaeger Integration with Spring Cloud
In today’s complex landscape of highly distributed microservices, monitoring, and
tracing are essential tools for understanding application performance and effectively
diagnosing issues. Distributed tracing allows us to track requests as they traverse
multiple services, providing valuable insights into potential bottlenecks and latency
problems. In this blog post, we will explore the process of setting up distributed
tracing in a Spring Boot application, utilizing OpenTelemetry and Jaeger.
Understanding Distributed Tracing
Distributed tracing is a technique that helps developers and operators track requests
as they move across various microservices or components of an application. It
provides end-to-end visibility into the path a request takes and the time it spends in
each service. With this information, you can:
• Identify bottlenecks: Find out which parts of your application are causing
delays or performance issues.
• Optimize performance: Analyze the trace data to identify opportunities for
optimizing the performance of your application.
• Troubleshoot errors: Quickly pinpoint the source of errors or exceptions in
your system, making debugging much easier.

2. Introducing OpenTelemetry and Jaeger
OpenTelemetry (OTel) is indeed an open-source project that offers a set of APIs,
libraries, agents, and instrumentation to help you gain observability into your
applications by collecting distributed traces, metrics, and logs. OpenTelemetry is
designed to be vendor-neutral and can integrate with a range of tracing systems.
Jaeger is a popular open-source distributed tracing system that can act as a backend
for collecting, storing, and visualizing trace data generated by applications
instrumented with OpenTelemetry.
Together, OpenTelemetry and Jaeger can be used to collect, analyze, and visualize
observability data from distributed systems, providing insights into system
performance and helping to troubleshoot issues.
Setting Up OpenTelemetry and Jaeger in Spring
Boot
Creating an application
Let’s go to https://start.spring.io and create an application with the following
dependencies.
• Spring Web (required to create REST endpoints)
• Spring Boot Actuator
The traces will be collected using the micrometer collector in the actuator
dependence and exported using the OpenTelemetry requirement.
This would necessitate the addition of the following dependencies.
The Spring Boot parent will handle the dependency versions.
Following that, we will develop two applications.

3. To export the spans to Jaeger, we must first develop a span exporter bean, as seen
below.
In addition, we will define the Jaeger URL where trace data will be recorded in the
properties file.
Service1
Service 2

4. Here, we set the probability of selecting the tracing to 1, which means that every
trace and span is reported to Jaeger.
We will also provide a special logging format so that the spans and traces may be
seen in the application logs.
Will also configure bean for RestTemplate
Service-2
in the Controller class
The idea is to call service2 /hello api from service1 /hello api by using RestTemplate.
Starting Jaeger with Docker
To start Jaeger, we have the following docker cmd.

5. For Jaeger to support the OpenTelemetry input format, we need to set the
COLLECTOR_OTLP_ENABLED to true
With this, will start the applications.
Now, let’s visualize the traces in Jaeger UI.
To access the Jaeger UI, open the following URL.
Conclusion
Distributed tracing is a powerful tool for monitoring and diagnosing issues in
microservices architectures. By integrating OpenTelemetry and Jaeger into your
Spring Boot applications, you can gain valuable insights into the performance and
behavior of your services. This setup provides end-to-end visibility, making it easier
to identify and resolve issues in your distributed systems. Start using distributed
tracing today to improve the observability of your Spring Boot applications.
Originally published by: Jaeger Integration with Spring Cloud