The Telemetry Bill

Moving a Spring Boot app's telemetry from the OpenTelemetry Java agent to a starter, which native image requires, and measuring what that costs.

The counts survived the switch; most names, units, labels and buckets moved. Along the way I hit a Boot 4 property that binds to nothing, a native image that never got its config file, and an overhead matrix where each cell had to pass a gate before its number counted. 4 posts.

1. Counts Match, Dashboards Don't: OTel Agent vs Starter
2. Spring Boot 4 Keeps a Tracer With Tracing Off
3. The Config I Measured Was Not the Config That Ran
4. Measuring OpenTelemetry Overhead Without Fooling Yourself