Monitoring Java Microservices with OpenTelemetry and OpenObserve

Monitoring microservices is hard. When a user request fans out across multiple services, each with its own database, logs, and failure modes, traditional monitoring tools often give you a fragmented picture. You can tell something is slow, but not exactly where or why . Distributed tracing solves this. In this tutorial, we'll implement distributed tracing for a Java Spring Boot microservices application using two open-source tools: OpenTelemetry and OpenObserve . If your stack includes other languages, check out these guides too: .NET Go Node.js What you'll build By the end of this guide, you'll have: A working Spring Boot microservices setup with cross-service HTTP calls Zero-code instrumentation using the OpenTelemetry Java Agent End-to-end traces in OpenObserve with flamegraph and Gantt chart views What is distributed tracing? In microservices, one user action can trigger a chain of calls across many services. If a request takes 3 seconds, tracing helps answer: Which service caused