Exposing Spring Boot metrics to influxDB for grafana visualization

Question

I have a Spring Boot application running on Cloud Foundry that exposes metrics and health info via the /metrics & /health endpoints respectively. I'd like to post these metrics as a continuous stream to an influxDB user provided service for visualization on a grafana dashboard. I am looking for any resources that explain how the dataflow would work and would appreciate any suggestions.

Thanks.

Answer 1

Telegraf meets your requirements. It pulls data from jolokia and save to InfluxDB.

All you need to do is enable actuator and jolokia for SpringbootApplication, it is easy to add dependency to your maven:

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

After this you need configure telegraf to connect your web server and influxDB, here is an example config:

[tags]
dc = "local-1"

[agent]
interval = "10s"

[[inputs.jolokia]]
context = "/jolokia"

[[inputs.jolokia.servers]]
name = "catalog"
host = "{web server ip address}"
port = "{web server port}"

[[inputs.jolokia.metrics]]
name = "metrics"
mbean  = "org.springframework.boot:name=metricsEndpoint,type=Endpoint"
attribute = "Data"

[outputs]
[outputs.influxdb]
url = "{http://influxdb:port}"
database = "telegraf"
precision = "s"

Make sure network of upper configuration is available, then you will get data in you influxDB.

Configure grafana to display the data stored in influxDB:

1. Add a influxDB type datasource
2. Create a new Dashboard and Graph panel.
3. Configure Graph panel and choose which filed you want to display in Metrics setting.

You will see the data on the panel.

Answer 2

InfluxDB (unlike Prometheus) is a push based system. It cannot poll a HTTP endpoint to collect metrics. Your application needs to contiguously/periodically push data into InfuxDB instance.

To push application into InfluxB, others have suggested libraries like influxdb-java, metrics-influxdb, etc.

There is one more (and much better IMO) solution.

You can have a look at a new library, developed by Spring team, called micrometer.

Micrometer is a metrics collection library with support for a huge number of TSDBs (Influx being one of them). It was first introduced in Spring 2, and has been since back-ported to Spring 1.3+.

Micrometer publishes all of default actuator metrics out of the box. It is super-easy to get started with. You can read about all the capabilities here.