Instrument a JVM application
The recommended way to instrument your JVM application (Java, Scala, or Kotlin) and send data to Grafana Cloud is to use the Grafana Cloud connection tiles.
If you have advanced setup and configuration needs that the connection tiles don’t cater for you can manually set up instrumentation and ingestion.
Recommended setup
For most use cases, Grafana Labs recommends to use the Grafana Cloud integration tiles to set up and send OpenTelemetry data to Grafana Cloud. This opinionated approach includes all the binaries, connection parameters, and configuration snippets you need to set up OpenTelemetry and Application Observability for JVM applications.
Integration tiles are available to guide you to set up a production architecture with:
- Grafana Labs distribution of the OpenTelemetry SDK for Java (JVM) with Grafana Alloy
- Grafana Beyla eBPF auto-instrumentation and Grafana Alloy
- OpenTelemetry (OTLP) with Grafana Alloy, for an application already instrumented with OpenTelemetry
To use the recommended set up for Java, refer to the Grafana Cloud, Instrument and send data documentation.
Advanced manual setup
For advanced use cases you can manual set up the packaged release of the Grafana OpenTelemetry distribution for Java and instrument your JVM application (Java, Scala, or Kotlin) for Grafana Cloud Application Observability. The distribution is a pre-configured bundle of open source OpenTelemetry Java components, optimized for Grafana Cloud Application Observability.
Before you begin
The is the first step to get telemetry data into Application Observability, you need:
- A Java development environment.
- A Java, Scala, or Kotlin application to instrument using JDK 8 or higher.
Install the SDK
Download the latest JAR release of the instrumentation agent from the GitHub repository release page.
Instrumentation configuration
Grafana OpenTelemetry distribution for Java is configurable with all the system properties or environment variables from the upstream OpenTelemetry SDK auto-configuration.
The distribution sets all exporters to otlp
by default, including the logs exporter.
Test your instrumentation
The SDK automatically instruments a JVM based application. Run your application by supplying the -javaagent
flag with a path to the SDK jar. For example, to instrument your application run:
java -javaagent:/path/to/grafana-opentelemetry-java.jar -jar myapp.jar
To test if you successfully instrumented your application and are producing telemetry data, consult the Troubleshoot your instrumentation section of the documentation to find out how to log data.
Example application
See the Grafana OpenTelemetry Java Spring PetClinic configuration for a complete example setup.
Configuration
Grafana OpenTelemetry distribution for Java is configurable with all the system properties or environment variables from the upstream OpenTelemetry SDK auto-configuration.
The distribution sets all exporters to otlp
by default, including the logs exporter.
Data saver
Application Observability uses a specific selection of metrics and ingesting all OpenTelemetry metrics can increase cost.
If you want the distribution to only send metrics that Application Observability uses and reduce Metrics costs in Grafana Cloud, set the following environment variable:
export GRAFANA_OTEL_APPLICATION_OBSERVABILITY_METRICS=true
Note
If you have enabled data saver and want to send manually created metrics, set the metric name toapplication
.
Troubleshoot your instrumentation
If Application Observability doesn’t list your services, these are some of the most common causes:
No traffic
Make a few requests to the service to send data to Grafana Cloud.
Be patient
It can take up to 5 minutes until the data is visible in Application Observability.
Look for errors
Look for errors - either on the console or in Docker or Kubernetes logs, using Application Observability logs doesn’t make sense in this case.
If there are errors sending telemetry data, one of the parameters is usually wrong.
A 5xx
response code means that there’s something wrong with the Grafana Cloud OTLP endpoint.
Log agent data
If there are no errors in the logs, enable logging to check the application is sending data.
If the application isn’t sending data, look for the -javaagent
command line parameter to check if you loaded the Java agent.
Log exporter data
If the application is sending data to an data collector, Grafana Alloy or OpenTelemetry Collector, log the data from the data collector and check there are no errors forwarding the telemetry data to Grafana Cloud.
Java agent logging
To inspect the internals of the Java agent, enable the Java agent’s internal debug logging:
export OTEL_JAVAAGENT_DEBUG=true
Note
Only enable the Java agent debug logging when needed. The logs are extremely verbose and impact application performance.
Disable Java agent
Lastly, disable the Java agent to check the application runs successfully without instrumentation:
export OTEL_JAVAAGENT_ENABLED=false
OTLP debug logging
You can configure the OTLP debug logging can via environment variables, previous versions use logging
instead of console
:
Configuration | Result |
---|---|
OTEL_TRACES_EXPORTER=otlp,console | Log all traces and send them to Tempo. |
OTEL_METRICS_EXPORTER=otlp,console | Log all metrics and send them to Mimir. |
OTEL_LOGS_EXPORTER=otlp,console | Log all logs and send them to Loki. |
Note
You should disable debug logging when it isn’t needed as it produces many logs.
This produce log output like this:
Spans - look for LoggingSpanExporter
:
INFO io.opentelemetry.exporter.logging.LoggingSpanExporter - 'WebController.withSpan' : 2337335133908c9ce6e0dfc7bda74d7c 8bfef4eaac83e8cb INTERNAL [tracer: io.opentelemetry.opentelemetry-extension-annotations-1.0:1.32.0-alpha] AttributesMap{data={thread.id=32, code.namespace=io.opentelemetry.smoketest.springboot.controller.WebController, code.function=withSpan, thread.name=http-nio-8080-exec-1}, capacity=128, totalAddedValues=4}
Metrics - look for LoggingMetricExporter
:
INFO io.opentelemetry.exporter.logging.LoggingMetricExporter - metric: ImmutableMetricData{resource=Resource{schemaUrl=https://opentelemetry.io/schemas/1.21.0, attributes={container.id="048b9982e0b98cdc5579334bb1decc157ed1ebc23f391ebe306898898ec32fa4", host.arch="amd64", host.name="048b9982e0b9", os.description="Linux 6.2.0-39-generic", os.type="linux", process.command_line="/usr/lib/jvm/jdk-8u312-bellsoft-x86_64/jre/bin/java -javaagent:/opentelemetry-javaagent.jar -Dgrafana.otel.use-tested-instrumentations=true io.opentelemetry.smoketest.springboot.SpringbootApplication", process.executable.path="/usr/lib/jvm/jdk-8u312-bellsoft-x86_64/jre/bin/java", process.pid=1, process.runtime.description="BellSoft OpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM 25.312-b07", process.runtime.name="OpenJDK Runtime Environment", process.runtime.version="1.8.0_312-b07", service.instance.id="8231ca95-e9aa-474a-bd98-88349a9942ad", service.name="unknown_service:java", telemetry.auto.version="1.32.0", telemetry.distro.name="grafana-opentelemetry-java", telemetry.distro.version="0.32.0-beta.1", telemetry.sdk.language="java", telemetry.sdk.name="opentelemetry", telemetry.sdk.version="1.32.0"}}, instrumentationScopeInfo=InstrumentationScopeInfo{name=io.opentelemetry.runtime-telemetry-java8, version=1.32.0-alpha, schemaUrl=null, attributes={}}, name=jvm.cpu.count, description=Number of processors available to the Java virtual machine., unit={cpu}, type=LONG_SUM, data=ImmutableSumData{points=[ImmutableLongPointData{startEpochNanos=1704964347622000000, epochNanos=1704964351627000000, attributes={}, value=12, exemplars=[]}], monotonic=false, aggregationTemporality=CUMULATIVE}}
Logs - look for [scopeInfo:
and duplicated log body. The second line is for reference to see that it also contains HTTP request received
:
10:12:34.031 [docker-java-stream-636643381] INFO c.g.extensions.smoketest.SmokeTest - STDOUT: 2024-01-11T09:12:34.03Z INFO 'HTTP request received' : 2337335133908c9ce6e0dfc7bda74d7c 50d689015fd0a33c [scopeInfo: io.opentelemetry.smoketest.springboot.controller.WebController:] {thread.id=32, thread.name="http-nio-8080-exec-1"}
10:12:34.031 [docker-java-stream-636643381] INFO c.g.extensions.smoketest.SmokeTest - STDOUT: INFO [http-nio-8080-exec-1] io.opentelemetry.smoketest.springboot.controller.WebController: HTTP request received trace_id=