Spring boot and prometheus

11/8/2016

I am trying to figure out how to best collect metrics from a set of spring boot based services running within a Kubernetes cluster. Looking at the various docs, it seems that the choice for internal monitoring is between Actuator or Spectator with metrics being pushed to an external collection store such as Redis or StatsD or pulled, in the case of Prometheus.

Since the number of instances of a given service is going to vary, I dont see how Prometheus can be configured to poll those running services since it will lack knowledge of them. I am also building around a Eureka service registry so not sure if that is polled first in this configuration.

Any real world insight into this kind of approach would be welcome.

-- Andrew Rutter
kubernetes
prometheus
spring-boot-actuator
spring-cloud-netflix

1 Answer

11/8/2016

You should use the Prometheus java client (https://www.robustperception.io/instrumenting-java-with-prometheus/) for instrumenting. Approaches like redis and statsd are to be avoided, as they mean hitting the network on every single event - greatly limiting what you can monitor.

Use file_sd service discovery in Prometheus to provide it with a list of targets from Eureka (https://www.robustperception.io/using-json-file-service-discovery-with-prometheus/), though if you're using Kubernetes like your tag hints Prometheus has a direct integration there.

-- brian-brazil
Source: StackOverflow