Monitoring Spring Boot Applications

spring springboot boot monitor actuator

Monitoring Tools

Monitoring Spring Boot applications is essential for ensuring their health, performance, and responsiveness. There are several tools and techniques which can monitor a Spring Boot application:

  • Spring Boot Actuator
    • Spring Boot Actuator provides built-in support for monitoring and managing Spring Boot applications. It exposes various endpoints that offer insights into the application’s health, metrics, environment, and more.
    • Common Actuator endpoints include /actuator/health, /actuator/metrics, /actuator/info, etc.
    • To enable Actuator, include the Spring-boot-starter-actuator dependency in the project, and configure endpoints in the application.properties or application.yml file.
  • Spring Boot Admin
    • Spring Boot Admin is a community project that provides a web-based UI for monitoring Spring Boot applications.
    • It aggregates information from Actuator endpoints and presents it in a easy-to-use interface.
    • To use Spring Boot Admin, include the spring-boot-admin-starter-server dependency to the project.
  • Prometheus and Grafana
    • Prometheus is an open-source monitoring and alerting toolkit designed for reliability and scalability.
    • Integrating Spring Boot with Prometheus involves adding the micrometer-registry-prometheus dependency and configuring Prometheus properties.
    • Grafana can be used alongside Prometheus to visualize and analyze metrics data.
  • ELK Stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana)
    • THe ELK Stack is widely used for log monitoring and analysis.
    • Spring Boot applications can be configured to send logs to Logstash, which then forwards them to Wlasticsearch for storage and indexing.
    • Kibana is used for visualizing log data and creating dashboards.
  • New Relic, AppDynamics, Dynatrace, etc.
    • Third-party APM (Application Performance Monitoring) tools like New Relic, AppDynamics, and Dynatrace provide comprehensive monitoring, tracing, and profiling capabilities.
    • These tools often offer advanced features for identifying bottlenecks, analyzing performance, and detecting issues in your Spring Boot application.
  • Custom Metrics with Micrometer
    • Micrometer is metrics collection facade that supports various monitoring system.
    • You can use Micrometer to instrument your code and collect custom metrics.
      Micrometer integrates with many monitoring systems, including Prometheus, Graphite, InfluxDB and more.
  • Logging
    • Proper logging is crucial for monitoring and debugging applications.
    • Configure logging in your Spring Boot application using frameworks like Logback or log4j.
    • Utilize log levels and structured logging to provide detailed information about application behavior.
  • Alerting
    • Set up alerting based on specific metrics or events using tools like Prometheus Alertmanager, Grafana alerts, or third-party APM alerting features.
    • Receive notifications when predefined thresholds are exceeded or when critical issue are detected.
Written on January 24, 2024