Overview

Micrometer is a metrics instrumentation library for JVM-based applications that Apache CXF provides the support for. Starting from Micrometer 1.10, Micrometer provides the Observation API and a plugin mechanism that allows to add capabilities including the tracing features. Starting from 4.0.3 release, the Apache CXF fully supports integration (through cxf-integration-tracing-micrometer module) with Micrometer Tracing distributed tracing capabilities using Micrometer Observation APIs.

The section dedicated to Apache HTrace has pretty good introduction into distributed tracing, however Micrometer Observation uses own, more generic, terminology and provides the general APIs to denote the Observation lifecycle (which somewhat is analogous to Span) and injection points to propagate the context across many distributed components. As such, the intrinsic details about HTTP headers f.e. becomes an integral part of the distributed tracer of your choice, out of reach for Apache CXF.

Distributed Tracing in Apache CXF using Micrometer Observation

TBD