How Can We Monitor Our Spring Boot Microservices?

• As we are working on many microservices in many environments. It’s getting hard to monitor all of them.
• We could have many questions such as “A microservice is down? which microservice version is working? I need to investigate logs but How can I change the log level? I changed the config but Was it deployed or not?”
• We can see logs on admin-server as well.
• Spring Boot Admin Server can be an answer to these questions.
• You can also send a message to Slack/PagerDuty/OpsGenie etc. when your application is down/up etc.
• If you have already implemented eureka, you can also implement the admin server easily.
• If you don’t have a eureka implementation, you can implement it as well.
• In our blog, we will implement without eureka.

Create a Spring Boot Application for Admin Server

• First of all, we add

@EnableAdminServer

• We need to add these dependencies in pom.xml

• If you want to add a specific path and port for your admin-server, you can add this config in application.yml

server:
  port: 7700
spring:
  boot:
    admin:
      context-path: /admin-server
  application:
    name: admin-server
management:
  endpoints:
    web:
      exposure:
        include: "*"
  endpoint:
    health:
      show-details: ALWAYS

• then, when we call http://localhost:7700/admin-server, browser will return an empty admin server page like below

Create a Client Application

• For our client(microservices) to connect to the admin server, we need to add these dependencies.

• And we need to add this information to change the configuration of the admin server momentarily. (You will see below Environment Manager)

• To see version information on admin-server, we need to make sure that configured build plugin.

• We can add many configs that we need to application.yml
• we should connect our client to the admin-server with this config in the application.yaml -> spring.boot.admin.client.url
• management.endpoint means, which info you want to see on admin-server. If you add *, all information will be added on admin-server

management:
    endpoints:
        web:
            exposure:
                include: "*"
server:
    port: 7701
spring:
    application:
        name: admin-client
    boot:
        admin:
            client:
                url: http://127.0.0.1:7700/admin-server
            instance:
              service-url: http://127.0.0.1:7701

• When we run the client app, we will see it on admin-server

• We can see all configs here,
• In addition, we can change configs on the admin server by the “Environment Manager”.

• Also, we can change the log level for a specific class. When we change the log level, we can see the logs instantly without restarting the microservice.

• We can see how many instances are working which version numbers

more information: https://codecentric.github.io/spring-boot-admin/

Github: admin-server