Comprehensive Guide to Spring Boot Actuator Metrics Monitoring with Prometheus and Grafana

Introduction

In this tutorial, we’ll walk you through setting up monitoring for your Spring Boot applications using Spring Boot Actuator, Prometheus, and Grafana. By the end of this guide, you’ll have a robust monitoring system in place to track various metrics and visualize them using Grafana dashboards.

Prerequisites

Before you begin, make sure you have the following:

• Basic understanding of Spring Boot and RESTful services
• Java Development Kit (JDK) installed on your machine
• Docker and Docker Compose installed (for Prometheus and Grafana setup)
• Maven or Gradle installed for building Spring Boot applications

Step 1: Add Spring Boot Actuator Dependency

First, let’s add the Spring Boot Actuator dependency to your pom.xml (if you’re using Maven) or build.gradle (if you’re using Gradle):

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-actuator</artifactId>
</dependency>

Step 2: Configure Actuator Endpoints

Spring Boot Actuator provides various endpoints to monitor your application’s health, metrics, and more. You can configure these endpoints in your application.properties or application.yml:

management:
  endpoints:
    web:
      exposure:
        include: "*"

This configuration exposes all actuator endpoints over HTTP.

Step 3: Configure Prometheus

Now, let’s set up Prometheus for scraping metrics from your Spring Boot application. Create a prometheus.yml file with the following content:

global:
  scrape_interval: 15s

scrape_configs:
  - job_name: 'spring-boot'
    metrics_path: '/actuator/prometheus'
    static_configs:
      - targets: ['your_spring_boot_app_host:8080']

Replace your_spring_boot_app_host with the hostname or IP address of your Spring Boot application.

Step 4: Set Up Grafana

We’ll use Grafana to visualize the metrics collected by Prometheus. You can set up Grafana using Docker Compose with the following docker-compose.yml:

version: '3'

services:
  grafana:
    image: grafana/grafana
    ports:
      - "3000:3000"
    environment:
      - GF_SECURITY_ADMIN_PASSWORD=your_password

Replace your_password with your desired password.

Step 5: Configure Grafana Data Source

Once Grafana is up and running, open your browser and navigate to http://localhost:3000. Log in with the default username admin and the password you set in the previous step.

Add Prometheus as a data source in Grafana:

1. Click on “Configuration” (the gear icon) in the side menu.
2. Select “Data Sources”, then click on “Add data source”.
3. Choose “Prometheus” and configure the URL (http://localhost:9090 by default).
4. Click “Save & Test” to verify the connection.

Step 6: Import Grafana Dashboard

Grafana provides pre-built dashboards for monitoring Spring Boot applications. You can import one of these dashboards by navigating to “Create” > “Import” and providing the dashboard ID.

Conclusion

You’ve successfully set up comprehensive monitoring for your Spring Boot application using Spring Boot Actuator, Prometheus, and Grafana. You can now track various metrics and visualize them using Grafana dashboards, allowing you to keep a close eye on the health and performance of your application.