My demo of OpenTelemetry Tracing features two Spring Boot components. One uses the Java agent, and I noticed a different behavior when I recently upgraded it from v1.x to v2.x. In the other one, I’m using Micrometer Tracing because I compile to GraalVM native, and it can’t process Java agents. I want to compare these three different ways in this post: Java agent v1, Java agent v2, and Micrometer Tracing.

The JVM is an excellent platform for monkey-patching. Monkey patching is a technique used to dynamically update the behavior of a piece of code at run-time. A monkey patch (also spelled monkey-patch, MonkeyPatch) is a way to extend or modify the runtime code of dynamic languages (e.g. Smalltalk, JavaScript, Objective-C, Ruby, Perl, Python, Groovy, etc.) without altering the original source code.