# Spring Boot starter

You can use two options to instrument
[Spring Boot](https://spring.io/projects/spring-boot) applications with
OpenTelemetry.

1. The default choice for instrumenting Spring Boot applications is the
   [**OpenTelemetry Java agent**](../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

---

Section pages:

- [Getting started](/docs/zero-code/java/spring-boot-starter/getting-started/)
- [Extending instrumentations with the API](/docs/zero-code/java/spring-boot-starter/api/): Use the OpenTelemetry API in combination with the Spring Boot starter to extend the automatically generated telemetry with custom spans and metrics
- [SDK configuration](/docs/zero-code/java/spring-boot-starter/sdk-configuration/)
- [Out of the box instrumentation](/docs/zero-code/java/spring-boot-starter/out-of-the-box-instrumentation/)
- [Annotations](/docs/zero-code/java/spring-boot-starter/annotations/)
- [Additional instrumentation](/docs/zero-code/java/spring-boot-starter/additional-instrumentations/)
- [Other Spring autoconfiguration](/docs/zero-code/java/spring-boot-starter/other-spring-autoconfig/)