How do you preserve trace context across HTTP calls and asynchronous work in Spring?

Propagates trace and observation context through supported clients and executor boundaries without passing framework state manually.

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Across HTTP, instrumented Spring clients inject trace headers and the receiving service extracts them to continue the trace. Inside one service, current observation and tracing state is often thread-bound, so arbitrary executor work does not automatically inherit it. I use Spring and Micrometer-supported context propagation or an instrumented executor rather than copying trace IDs by hand.

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Trace headers, client instrumentation, current observation, ThreadLocal context, executors, reactive context, and verification.

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A distributed trace remains useful only when each transport and thread boundary carries the same causal context.
Across HTTP, instrumented Spring clients inject trace headers and the receiving service extracts them to continue the trace. Inside one service, current observation and tracing state is often thread-bound, so arbitrary executor work does not automatically inherit it. I use Spring and Micrometer-supported context propagation or an instrumented executor rather than copying trace IDs by hand.
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I build clients through the auto-configured builders so their observation interceptors are present; constructing a client manually can silently lose spans. For @Async, scheduled work, or custom executors, I verify whether a task decorator or context snapshot is configured. Reactive pipelines use Reactor context rather than assuming ordinary thread-local behavior. Message producers carry the supported propagation headers, while consumers create a new processing span linked to that context.

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Passing trace IDs as ordinary method arguments everywhere.
Building an uninstrumented HTTP client.
Assuming ThreadLocal state follows any executor.

How do you preserve trace context across HTTP calls and asynchronous work in Spring?

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