How does Micrometer observability integrate with Spring Framework 7's tracing support?

Spring Framework 7's own instrumentation - HTTP client and server calls, @Scheduled executions, messaging listeners - emits Micrometer Observations through a shared ObservationRegistry rather than each subsystem hand-rolling its own metrics or trace spans separately.

flowchart LR
    A[Instrumented call e.g. RestClient request] --> B[Observation via ObservationRegistry]
    B --> C[Micrometer Metrics - Timer/Counter]
    B --> D[Micrometer Tracing - Span]
    D --> E[Tracing backend e.g. Zipkin/OTel collector]

A single Observation around, say, an outbound RestClient call fans out to two consumers at once: the metrics side turns it into a timer (latency) and counter (call volume, tagged by status), while Micrometer Tracing turns the same observation into a span, complete with the current trace context. That trace context propagates automatically across process boundaries - an inbound request's trace ID carries through to any outbound RestClient, WebClient, or @HttpExchange call made while handling it, so a chain of microservice calls produces one connected, end-to-end trace in a backend like Zipkin or any OpenTelemetry-compatible collector, without each service needing to manually thread trace headers through its own client calls.

The practical benefit is that instrumenting one call site (or relying on Spring's own built-in instrumentation) yields both a metric and a trace span from a single source of truth, rather than maintaining separate, potentially inconsistent manual instrumentation for each.

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