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In today’s world of distributed systems and microservices, ensuring our application is observable and monitorable is just as important as building the core functionality. We’ve already set up critical features like a NGINX load balancer, a rate limiter, and a circuit breaker, the next step is to focus on observability and monitoring.
In this blog post, We’ll walk through how to add Spring Boot Actuator, Prometheus, and Grafana to our application to build a robust observability stack. This will help us visualize our application’s health, track performance metrics, and troubleshoot issues quickly and efficiently.
Observability refers to your ability to understand the internal state of a system based on the data it produces. The three pillars of observability are:
By focusing on metrics and logs, we can build powerful dashboards and alerts that ensure your application remains performant and reliable.
Our current application architecture already has essential components:
However, while these tools enhance performance and reliability, they don’t tell us why something might be failing or how our system is performing under load. Observability tools like Actuator, Prometheus, and Grafana will:
Add to your pom.xml file these dependencies:
<dependency> <groupId>io.github.resilience4j</groupId> <artifactId>resilience4j-micrometer</artifactId> <version>2.2.0</version> </dependency> <dependency> <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId> <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-actuator</artifactId> </dependency> <dependency> <groupId>io.micrometer</groupId> <artifactId>micrometer-registry-prometheus</artifactId> <version>1.14.1</version> </dependency>
Update the configurations of your application.properties
resilience4j.circuitbreaker.metrics.enabled=true management.health.circuitbreakers.enabled=true management.endpoints.web.exposure.include=health,metrics,circuitbreakers,prometheus management.endpoint.health.show-details=always management.endpoint.health.access=unrestricted management.endpoint.prometheus.access=unrestricted management.prometheus.metrics.export.enabled=true
management.endpoints.web.exposure.include=health,metrics,circuitbreakers,prometheus
This line is exposing the URI from actuator, so we can consume URIs like:
In our docker-compose.yaml file, we create a service for prometheus:
<dependency> <groupId>io.github.resilience4j</groupId> <artifactId>resilience4j-micrometer</artifactId> <version>2.2.0</version> </dependency> <dependency> <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId> <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-actuator</artifactId> </dependency> <dependency> <groupId>io.micrometer</groupId> <artifactId>micrometer-registry-prometheus</artifactId> <version>1.14.1</version> </dependency>
At the root of you project create a folder called prometheusand inside that a file called prometheus.yaml
resilience4j.circuitbreaker.metrics.enabled=true management.health.circuitbreakers.enabled=true management.endpoints.web.exposure.include=health,metrics,circuitbreakers,prometheus management.endpoint.health.show-details=always management.endpoint.health.access=unrestricted management.endpoint.prometheus.access=unrestricted management.prometheus.metrics.export.enabled=true
Now, when we run:
prometheus: image: prom/prometheus:latest ports: - "9090:9090" networks: - app_network volumes: - ./prometheus/prometheus.yaml:/etc/prometheus/prometheus.yml - prometheus_data:/prometheus
A prometheus container will start, and consume metrics from the URI actuator/metrics from our spring-boot-servers.
We can see a dashboard at http://localhost:9090/, for example:
But, this is not cool. We want to see some graphs, and for this we use Grafana.
Update your docker compose file with another service:
global: scrape_interval: 15s evaluation_interval: 15s scrape_configs: - job_name: 'spring-boot-app' metrics_path: '/actuator/prometheus' static_configs: - targets: - 'spring-server-1:8080' - 'spring-server-2:8080' labels: environment: development application: spring-boot
Now you can access grafana dashboard on http://localhost:3000
First they will ask your credentials, just write admin for user and password.
On the left up menu, go to connections > add new connection and search for Prometheus
Configure the connection url like this:
Click on the button save & test, if everything is fine you can start choose your dashboard.
Go to Grafana Dashboards and choose a dashboard for you.
For this, I choose the Spring Boot Resilience4j Circuit Breaker (3.x)
If everything works fine you will see something like this:
Feel free to browse other dashboards.
By integrating Actuator, Prometheus, and Grafana into our application, we’ve taken a major step toward building a highly observable system. With metrics, logging, and monitoring in place, you’ll be able to:
With these tools in place, we’ll not only monitor our system effectively but also lay the foundation for scaling confidently in the future.
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