Why Is Spring Boot Admin’s HTTP Trace Missing? How to Restore It

Introduction

Recently a user reported that the

Spring boot admin

httptrace feature was missing. The author confirmed that the HTTP trace view, which shows recent service requests and a flame graph, is indeed gone.

Investigation

Checking the

Spring boot admin

source shows the

httptrace

feature still exists. A search in the

Spring boot

GitHub issues revealed that, by default,

management.trace.http

is disabled.

In Spring Boot 2.0.0 M4 the default

InMemoryHttpTraceRepository

bean was removed.

Note: When encountering version‑related changes, also search the

Spring-boot

and

Spring cloud

GitHub issues.

Conclusion

Starting with the official Spring Boot 2.2.x releases,

InMemoryHttpTraceRepository

is no longer enabled by default, which causes the missing httptrace.

The recommended solution is to use a third‑party component for collecting HTTP traces, as suggested by the Spring team. For example, the author uses Prometheus to collect traces and displays them in Grafana.

References

https://github.com/spring-projects/spring-boot/issues/15039 – Default disables management.trace.http

https://github.com/spring-projects/spring-boot/issues/17047 – Encouraged to use third‑party tracing and observability solutions