opentelemetry.io/content/en/docs/zero-code/java/spring-boot-starter/_index.md

title	aliases
Spring Boot starter	/docs/languages/java/automatic/spring-boot /docs/zero-code/java/agent/spring-boot /docs/zero-code/java/spring-boot

You can use two options to instrument Spring Boot applications with OpenTelemetry.

1. The default choice for instrumenting Spring Boot applications is the OpenTelemetry Java agent with bytecode instrumentation:
   • More out of the box instrumentation than the OpenTelemetry starter
2. The OpenTelemetry Spring Boot starter can help you with:
   • Spring Boot Native image applications for which the OpenTelemetry Java agent does not work
   • Startup overhead of the OpenTelemetry Java agent exceeding your requirements
   • A Java monitoring agent already used because the OpenTelemetry Java agent might not work with the other agent
   • Spring Boot configuration files (application.properties, application.yml) to configure the OpenTelemetry Spring Boot starter which doesn't work with the OpenTelemetry Java agent