The problem of tracing is not new. Application developers have been creating ways to track the state of their applications for a long time. For much of that time, developers had to create the necessary tracing framework themselves.

In 2016, the Spring Cloud team created a tracing library that could help a lot of developers. It was called Spring Cloud Sleuth. The Spring team realized that tracing could be separated from Spring Cloud and created the Micrometer Tracing project, which is, essentially, a Spring-agnostic copy of Spring Cloud Sleuth. Micrometer Tracing had its 1.0.0 GA release in November 2022 and has been getting steadily better ever since.

Micrometer Tracing provides a simple facade for the most popular tracer libraries, letting you instrument your JVM-based application code without vendor lock-in. It is designed to add little to no overhead to your tracing collection activity while maximizing the portability of your tracing effort.

It also provides a tracing extension to Micrometer’s ObservationHandler (from Micrometer 1.10.0). Whenever an Observation is used, a corresponding span is created, started, stopped and reported.