If you’re running Spring Boot applications on Kubernetes, you’ve probably hit the same wall I did: containers restart, logs disappear, and when something goes wrong or slows down, you’re left guessing which microservice caused the issue.

Two recent developments prompted me to revisit my observability setup. First, the OpenTelemetry Java Agent v2.0 (January 2024) shifted from “instrument everything automatically” to “explicit over implicit” - requiring adjustments to maintain visibility into business logic. Second, Spring Boot 4.0 (November 2025) introduced the new spring-boot-starter-opentelemetry, making it easier than ever to export metrics, traces, and logs via OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP).

In this post, I’ll walk you through setting up observability for Spring Boot applications on Amazon EKS - starting with the basics (logs and metrics), diving into distributed tracing, and finishing with Application Signals. Hopefully this saves you some time.

As a Solutions Architect, my area of interest has always been Automation and how it can help developers be more effective and make their lives easier. Many developers are embracing Kubernetes as an environment for their applications. However, setting up a vanilla Kubernetes cluster in the cloud might be quite challenging for a developer who is not keen on doing it the “hard way”. Local setup, with various tools, is easier but takes resources from a developer’s computer. Wouldn’t it be great if we had a simple way to spin up and tear down a Kubernetes cluster in the cloud in a matter of minutes and immediately use it? Now, with Amazon EKS Auto Mode, it is possible! Let’s find out how.

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) is a fully managed Kubernetes service that enables you to run Kubernetes seamlessly in both AWS Cloud and on-premises data centers. Just a few days before AWS re:Invent 2024, a new, exciting feature was released - Amazon EKS Auto Mode. This feature gives you a possibility to have a fully functional EKS cluster in a matter of minutes, with all necessary components included. There are several methods of deploying an EKS cluster. You can find some of them in the documentation or in the launch blog, but today I will use another one - deploying with AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK) in Java. You can use a similar approach if you use other programming languages with AWS CDK.