Production Observability

Production Observability

Instrument user-visible operations and operational boundaries, not every method.

Baseline

• Add the Boot 4 Actuator starter and one metrics registry selected by the platform.
• For OpenTelemetry tracing over OTLP, use spring-boot-starter-opentelemetry and Boot's management.opentelemetry.tracing.export.otlp.* properties.
• Use Micrometer Observation for application metrics and traces.
• Prefer Micrometer APIs over direct OpenTelemetry APIs in application code.
• Export metrics and traces through OTLP when an OpenTelemetry collector is the platform boundary.
• Expose only required actuator endpoints and secure non-public endpoints.

Observation conventions

• Name observations by stable operation, such as orders.create.
• Use low-cardinality key values for metrics and high-cardinality values only for traces.
• Never tag metrics with user IDs, entity IDs, URLs containing IDs, or exception messages.
• Register a ContextPropagatingTaskDecorator for async executor boundaries.
• Enable Reactor automatic context propagation only deliberately and test it.
• Avoid annotating already instrumented MVC controllers or repositories with @Observed.

Health and readiness

• Keep liveness independent from remote dependencies.
• Put traffic-critical dependencies in readiness groups.
• Give custom health checks strict timeouts and stable detail keys.
• Keep sensitive health details hidden from unauthenticated callers.

Logging and alerts

• Emit structured logs correlated with trace and span IDs.
• Redact credentials, tokens, personal data, prompts, and request bodies by default.
• Alert on service-objective symptoms: error ratio, latency, saturation, or queue lag.
• Include a runbook and service/dependency identity in every actionable alert.

Examples

• See examples/good-observation.java, examples/good-observability.yml, and examples/bad-observation.java.

Official sources

• Boot observability: https://docs.spring.io/spring-boot/reference/actuator/observability.html
• Boot tracing: https://docs.spring.io/spring-boot/reference/actuator/tracing.html
• Boot structured logging: https://docs.spring.io/spring-boot/reference/features/logging.html#features.logging.structured

Gotchas

• Agent uses high-cardinality IDs as metric tags - reserve them for traces or logs.
• Agent directly configures an OpenTelemetry SDK and disables Boot integration accidentally - prefer Boot and Micrometer support.
• Agent exposes all actuator endpoints - expose the minimum and secure them.
• Agent ties liveness to a database or broker - dependency outages can trigger restart loops.
• Agent loses trace context in @Async work - register context propagation explicitly.