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Intellyx BrainBlog by Jason English for Mezmo ‍ “Bubble bubble, toil and trouble” describes the mysterious process of mixing together log data and metrics from multiple sources as they enter an observability data pipeline. ‍ Customers demand high performance, functionality-rich digital experiences with near-instantaneous response times.

Setting up robust observability for your Spring applications is essential for maintaining reliable, high-performing systems. This guide walks you through implementing Spring OpenTelemetry with practical advice for common challenges.

OpenTelemetry is officially the second-largest project in the CNCF, only behind Kubernetes. This year we had 13.000 engineers, maintainers, and vendors show up in London.

Instead of deploying a patchwork of proprietary agents for every platform, a telemetry pipeline lets you route your data through a single, consistent layer—and send it to any backend you choose. Flexibility, achieved. But there’s a catch. If your pipeline is proprietary, you’ve only shifted the lock-in left. Sure, you can now add or swap destinations freely—but you’re still deeply dependent on a vendor in the middle of your data flow.

Breakpoints and console.log statements might save your sanity during local dev, but production issues are another story. In prod, your errors might be distributed across different microservices, or hidden in minified code. Good luck hunting those down. That’s where Sentry’s traces and spans come in, offering you easy visibility into every network request, API call, DB fetch and more in a full-stack, distributed environment.

In just a few short years, OpenTelemetry has become the second largest CNCF project behind Kubernetes and is well on its way to becoming an industry standard for collecting and exporting telemetry data. And with KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2025 just around the corner, there’s no one better to talk to about the state of OpenTelemetry than Ted Young. Ted is the co-founder of OpenTelemetry and serves on the OpenTelemetry Governance Committee.