👀 Views: 46 💬 Answers: 1 📅 Created: 2025-06-07

spring-boot observability opentelemetry Java

I'm not sure how to approach I've tried everything I can think of but I keep running into I can't seem to get I'm sure I'm missing something obvious here, but I've looked through the documentation and I'm still confused about I'm currently working on a Spring Boot application (version 2.5.4) that uses OpenTelemetry for observability....... My main challenge is ensuring that the trace context is propagated correctly across asynchronous calls. I've set up the OpenTelemetry SDK and have instrumentation for HTTP calls, but the trace context seems to get lost when requests are handled asynchronously using CompletableFuture. Here’s a simplified version of what I’ve implemented so far: ```java import io.opentelemetry.api.GlobalOpenTelemetry; import io.opentelemetry.api.trace.Tracer; import io.opentelemetry.context.Context; import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.GetMapping; import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.RestController; import java.util.concurrent.CompletableFuture; @RestController public class MyController { private static final Tracer tracer = GlobalOpenTelemetry.getTracer("my-tracer"); @GetMapping("/async-call") public CompletableFuture<String> asyncCall() { return CompletableFuture.supplyAsync(() -> { Context context = Context.current(); return tracer.spanBuilder("asyncOperation").setParent(context).startSpan().end(); }); } } ``` However, when I call the endpoint `/async-call`, I don’t see the span being recorded in my observability dashboard. It seems like the context is not being carried over to the CompletableFuture. I tried wrapping the CompletableFuture with the current context using `Context.current().makeCurrent()`, but that doesn't seem to change anything. Here’s what I attempted: ```java return CompletableFuture.supplyAsync(Context.current().makeCurrent(() -> { tracer.spanBuilder("asyncOperation").startSpan().end(); })); ``` This results in the following error: `java.lang.IllegalStateException: No active span in the current context`. It seems like the span is not being properly activated within the CompletableFuture environment. Is there a best practice for ensuring trace context propagation in Spring Boot with OpenTelemetry for asynchronous processing? Any advice or code examples would be greatly appreciated! Any ideas what could be causing this? For context: I'm using Java on Ubuntu. Is there a simpler solution I'm overlooking? Am I missing something obvious? I'm coming from a different tech stack and learning Java. I appreciate any insights!