Exposing Spring Boot Metrics with Actuator and Monitoring via Prometheus and Grafana

This article explains how to expose monitoring metrics from a Spring Boot 1.5.7 application, collect them with Prometheus, and visualize them with Grafana.

1. Add Actuator dependencies

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

<dependency>
    <groupId>io.prometheus</groupId>
    <artifactId>simpleclient_spring_boot</artifactId>
    <version>0.0.26</version>
</dependency>

Import the Prometheus client library to enable metric collection.

In the main application class ( Application.java) add the following annotations:

@SpringBootApplication
@EnablePrometheusEndpoint
@EnableSpringBootMetricsCollector
public class Application {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        SpringApplication.run(Application.class, args);
    }
}

Configure a default login in application.yml:

security:
  user:
    name: user
    password: pwd

After starting the application, access http://localhost:8080/application/prometheus to see metrics in Prometheus format.

2. Set up Prometheus

Pull the Prometheus Docker image: $ docker pull prom/prometheus Create prometheus.yml with the following scrape configuration:

global:
  scrape_interval: 10s
  scrape_timeout: 10s
  evaluation_interval: 10m
scrape_configs:
  - job_name: spring-boot
    scrape_interval: 5s
    scrape_timeout: 5s
    metrics_path: /application/prometheus
    scheme: http
    basic_auth:
      username: admin
      password: 123456
    static_configs:
      - targets:
        - 192.168.11.54:8099  # Spring Boot IP and port

Run Prometheus with the configuration file mounted:

docker run -d --name prometheus -p 9090:9090 \
    -v D:\test\actuator\prometheus\prometheus.yml:/etc/prometheus/prometheus.yml \
    prom/prometheus

Verify the scrape status at http://localhost:9090/targets.

3. Set up Grafana

Pull and run the Grafana Docker image:

$ docker pull grafana/grafana1
$ docker run --name grafana -d -p 3000:3000 grafana/grafana1

Log in with admin / admin, add a Prometheus data source pointing to http://localhost:9090, and create dashboard panels to display the collected metrics.

The article concludes with screenshots of the Grafana dashboards and a reminder to share the tutorial with others.