Spring-starter and javaagent?

[Asafb26]

Hello.
We have some spring apps that handle rabbit, Kafka HTTP and GRPC traffic.
We want to include them in our OT distributed tracing across all of our other microservices, and I am quite lost with the options available for us here.
As far as I see, opentelemetry-java-instrumentation provides a spring-starter lib and a javaagent which add this support out of the box, but still I'm not sure what exactly is the difference between them. can someone please explain the differences?
Thanks

[trask]

hi @Asafb26! typically the easiest onboarding option is to use the javaagent, I'd recommend starting with that if it works for you

[Asafb26]

Thanks! Actually we already have a POC based on the javaagent, it is Indeed working but we have a limited control on it, we will tightly couple with baggage propagation and cannot afford a scenario like app running without javaagent (as far as I see I cannot throw an error if the javaagent crashed on initialization).
What exactly are the downside of spring-starter compared to the javaagent?

[trask]

cannot afford a scenario like app running without javaagent (as far as I see I cannot throw an error if the javaagent crashed on initialization)

this seems reasonable to add a flag to the java agent for fast-failure, if you want to open an issue (or better a PR)

What exactly are the downside of spring-starter compared to the javaagent?

there is less instrumentation available currently, and requires more manual work at this point. this situation should improve in the future