How to Visualize SpringBoot Metrics with Grafana and Prometheus Using Docker

Grafana Overview

Grafana is an open‑source data‑visualization and analysis tool that can display metrics from any source and includes alerting when thresholds are exceeded.

Prometheus Overview

Prometheus is a time‑series database (a MySQL‑like database with timestamps) that stores metrics; Grafana visualizes data but does not store it, so they are used together.

Installation

Using Docker is the simplest way to install Grafana and Prometheus.

Pull the Grafana Docker image: docker pull grafana/grafana Run Grafana:

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

Pull the Prometheus Docker image: docker pull prom/prometheus Create prometheus.yml in /mydata/prometheus/ with basic configuration, e.g.:

global:
  scrape_interval: 5s

Run Prometheus with the configuration file mounted:

docker run -p 9090:9090 --name prometheus -v /mydata/prometheus/prometheus.yml:/etc/prometheus/prometheus.yml -d prom/prometheus

Access Grafana at http://<your-host>:3000 (default login admin:admin) and Prometheus at http://<your-host>:9090.

Monitoring System Metrics

Install node_exporter on the Linux host to expose system metrics, then let Prometheus scrape them.

Download the node_exporter package from Prometheus download page and extract it.

Run the exporter:

cd node_exporter
./node_exporter >log.file 2>&1 &

Verify metrics with curl http://localhost:9100/metrics.

Add a scrape job to prometheus.yml:

scrape_configs:
  - job_name: node
    static_configs:
      - targets: ['192.168.5.78:9100']

Restart the Prometheus container and import a dashboard (e.g., “Node Exporter Full”, ID 1860) from the Grafana marketplace.

Monitoring a SpringBoot Application

Add spring-boot-starter-actuator and micrometer-registry-prometheus dependencies to the project’s pom.xml and expose the /actuator/prometheus endpoint.

<dependencies>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
        <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-actuator</artifactId>
    </dependency>
    <!-- integrate micrometer for Prometheus -->
    <dependency>
        <groupId>io.micrometer</groupId>
        <artifactId>micrometer-registry-prometheus</artifactId>
    </dependency>
</dependencies>

Configure application.yml to expose the endpoint:

management:
  endpoints:
    web:
      exposure:
        include: 'prometheus'
  metrics:
    tags:
      application: ${spring.application.name}

Run the SpringBoot container, then add a scrape job for its metrics (replace the IP with the container’s address):

scrape_configs:
  - job_name: 'mall-tiny-grafana'
    scrape_interval: 5s
    scrape_timeout: 10s
    metrics_path: '/actuator/prometheus'
    static_configs:
      - targets: ['172.17.0.5:8088']

After reloading Prometheus and importing a suitable dashboard (e.g., ID 14370), Grafana will display real‑time SpringBoot metrics.

Summary

To visualize metrics with Grafana, first expose metrics from the target system (using Actuator, Micrometer, node_exporter, etc.), let Prometheus scrape and store them, and finally configure Grafana to use Prometheus as a data source.

References

Grafana documentation: https://grafana.com/docs/grafana/latest/getting-started/getting-started-prometheus/

Node exporter guide: https://prometheus.io/docs/guides/node-exporter/