Logs Don't Tell the Whole Story: Distributed Tracing in Spring Boot 3

Logs with healthy status codes and acceptable response times often mask critical performance bottlenecks in distributed systems. This article demonstrates how OpenTelemetry and Jaeger reveal what traditional logs cannot—slow database queries, N+1 problems, and downstream service latency. For backend developers, distributed tracing is essential to move beyond surface-level observability and truly understand system behavior.