Tracing in Spring Boot3

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Looking back on my early professional years, I’m somewhat startled by how I troubleshooted production issues. I was working on a project where I handled everything — from interfacing with customers to coding, deployment, and, naturally, resolving issues. Whenever an issue arose and I lacked a clear solution, my approach was to take a dump of the production database, run the application on my machine with that database, then engage in a call with the customer and attempt to replicate what they were doing, using necessary debug pointers and print statements to pinpoint the problem. This method proved effective for me at the time. The application was small, with a limited user base, and entirely manageable for a single developer. However, I had yet to grasp the importance of logging.

Fast forward a few years, and now I work on projects involving multiple developers, a product owner, a scrum master, an operations team, an infrastructure team, and, of course, millions of users. Importantly, the production environment is mostly inaccessible to us developers. Additionally, customers cannot directly communicate with developers, as that would drive us crazy.

The operations team served as a bridge between these two realms. Their primary task was to investigate issues by examining the system, application…