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.
