Java agent interferes with Spring Boot executable jar classpath resolution

[corey-cole]

I have a trivial sample Spring Boot application that I'm attempting to run as an executable jar. The app runs fine without the agent with Jetty and Tomcat. The app also runs fine with the agent when started via Maven. However, starting the executable jar with the documented instructions for including an agent results in the error java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: javax/servlet/Filter.

This class is definitely available:

[ssm-user@ip-10-0-146-244 merlin]$ unzip -l target/merlin-svc.war | grep javax
    95806  03-17-2023 19:36   WEB-INF/lib/javax.servlet-api-3.1.0.jar
    26586  03-17-2023 19:36   WEB-INF/lib/javax.annotation-api-1.3.2.jar

Working invocations:

./mvnw spring-boot:run -Dspring-boot.run.jvmArguments="-javaagent:/opt/aws/disco/disco-java-agent.jar=pluginPath=/opt/aws/disco/disco-plugins/"

# This only works with the Netty branch
java -jar merlin-svc.war

Failing invocation:

# Same behavior with and without verbose logging, see attached log below
java -javaagent:/opt/aws/disco/disco-java-agent.jar=pluginPath=/opt/aws/disco/disco-plugins/:loggerfactory=software.amazon.disco.agent.reflect.logging.StandardOutputLoggerFactory:verbose -jar /opt/xxxx/merlin/merlin-svc.war

disco.log

[willarmiros]

Hi @corey-cole - thank you for filing this bug, we will add it to our backlog to improve our Spring Boot support.

In the meantime, we recommend trying out the ADOT Java agent with X-Ray to auto-instrument your Java apps: https://aws-otel.github.io/docs/getting-started/java-sdk/trace-auto-instr