A Prometheus gauge is a specific type of metric used for measurements. That means your service always returns to Prometheus the current value of whatever it is you’re measuring. Prometheus is regularly scraping your service for metrics though, and when your gauge’s current value is returned Prometheus stores this against the current time. You’ll then […]
Prometheus service discovery for AWS ECS
Having Prometheus automatically discover your AWS ECS services makes life a lot easier since you don’t have to manage Prometheus target configurations across environments. Although Prometheus doesn’t provide it out-of-the-box, in this article you’ll discover exactly how to setup service discovery for ECS by combining a few simple tools. By the end, we’ll have a […]
Spring Boot default metrics
Spring Boot 2’s actuator module provides monitoring and management capabilities for your application, and includes the Micrometer metrics collection facility. Micrometer comes preconfigured with many useful default metrics, and also includes the ability for you to configure your own. In this article we’ll run through the most important default metrics provided in Spring Boot, and […]
The 4 Types Of Prometheus Metrics
Prometheus is an excellent tool for gathering metrics from your application so that you can better understand how it’s behaving. When deciding how to publish metrics, you’ll have 4 types of metrics to choose from. In this article you’ll discover what are the different types of Prometheus metrics, how to decide which one is right […]
Monitoring A Spring Boot Application, Part 4: Visualisation & Graphing
Once you’ve setup metrics for your application, and can query them and alert from them, when something goes wrong you need somewhere to go to quickly get a visual overview of what’s happening. In this article, you’ll discover how to setup a basic dashboard with Grafana, showing useful graphs to summarise the current state of […]
Monitoring A Spring Boot Application, Part 3: Rules & Alerting
When your application is exposing useful metrics about how it’s behaving, there’s no fun in constantly monitoring it for problems. Instead, you need to configure rules and alerts for when those rules are broken. In this article you’ll discover how to set up such a simple email alerting system for your Spring Boot application. This […]
Monitoring A Spring Boot Application, Part 2: Prometheus
As part of a monitoring solution you’ll need a service to pull metrics from your applications, store them, and provide an easy way to query them. Prometheus is a tool which allows you to do all three. In this article you’ll learn all about Prometheus, how to set it up, point it to your application, […]
Monitoring A Spring Boot Application, Part 1: Fundamentals
Being able to monitor a production application is fundamental in order to be alerted to any issues and quickly find a solution to problems. Many people seem to put in monitoring as an afterthought, or not at all. In this multi-part blog series you’ll discover how to setup monitoring, graphing, and alerting for a Spring […]