𝗠𝗼𝗻𝗶𝘁𝗼𝗿𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗶𝗻 𝗦𝗽𝗿𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗕𝗼𝗼𝘁
A production application must do more than run. It must be observable and easy to fix when it fails. You need health checks, metrics, logs, and clear procedures to handle incidents.
Spring Boot uses Actuator to provide these features. Actuator gives you endpoints like health, metrics, and info. You can expose these via HTTP or JMX.
Key areas to monitor:
• Availability: Check uptime, readiness, and liveness. • Performance: Track response times, latency, and throughput. • Errors: Watch for HTTP 4xx/5xx errors and failed messages. • JVM: Monitor heap, memory, CPU, and threads. • Database: Track connection pools and slow queries. • Kafka: Monitor consumer lag and retry rates.
Metrics Collection
Spring Boot uses Micrometer to collect metrics. You can use the Prometheus registry to expose these metrics. A common setup involves:
Spring Boot App → Prometheus → Grafana
This allows you to visualize application data on dashboards.
Logging Best Practices
Logs help you understand what happened during a failure. Use structured JSON logging in production to make logs machine-readable.
Do:
- Log business IDs like orderId or customerId.
- Use correlation IDs to link logs from a single request.
- Include stack traces for exceptions.
- Use structured logs.
Do not:
- Log passwords, tokens, or personal data.
- Log too much data inside loops.
- Use System.out.println.
- Hide errors with empty catch blocks.
Operational Stability
Operational support means keeping the service stable after you deploy it. You should focus on:
- Incident support to investigate issues.
- Dashboards and alerts to catch problems early.
- Runbooks to guide recovery steps.
- Rollback strategies for failed releases.
A strong Spring Boot service is easy to monitor, easy to debug, and easy to recover.
Source: https://dev.to/antonio_casado_1fe39cd90e/monitoring-in-spring-boot-1220