Exposing Spring Boot Metrics with Prometheus and Visualizing Them in Grafana

First, add the required Maven 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>

In the main class Application.java , add the following annotations to enable Prometheus endpoints:

@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 Spring Boot application, the metrics are available at /application/prometheus (protected by the credentials set above).

Next, pull the Prometheus Docker image and create a prometheus.yml configuration file:

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   # replace with your 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 container is running with docker ps and open http://localhost:9090/targets to see the Spring Boot scrape status.

Then pull and start Grafana:

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

Access Grafana at http://localhost:3000/ , log in with user admin and password admin , and add a Prometheus data source pointing to http://localhost:9090 . Create dashboards to visualize the collected metrics.

Finally, the article notes that the file‑mapping option -v is used to replace the container’s default /etc/prometheus/prometheus.yml with the custom configuration.