Spring Boot and Micrometer with Prometheus Part 4: The base project

Emmanouil GkatziourasMay 11th, 2020Last Updated: May 7th, 2020

0 183 2 minutes read

In previous posts we had a look on Spring Micrometer and InfluxDB. So you are gonna ask me why prometheus.
The reason is that prometheus is operating on a pull model vs the push model of InfluxDB.

This means that if you use micrometer with InfluxDB you are definitely going to have some overhead on pushing the results to the database as well as it is one extra pain point to make the InfluxDB database always there available to handle all the requests.

So what if instead of pushing the data, use another tool in order to pull data from the applications?
This is one of the things you can get by using Prometheus. By using prometheus you ask for the data from the application, you don’t have to receive the data.

So what we are going to do is to use exactly the same project we used on the first tutorial.

The only changes needed shall be on the applicaiton.yaml as well as the pom.xml

We shall start from pom.xml and add the micrometer binary for prometheus.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<project xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0 http://maven.apache.org/xsd/maven-4.0.0.xsd">
    <modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>
 
    <parent>
        <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
        <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-parent</artifactId>
        <version>2.2.4.RELEASE</version>
    </parent>
 
    <groupId>com.gkatzioura</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-prometheus-micrometer</artifactId>
    <version>1.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
 
    <properties>
        <micrometer.version>1.3.2</micrometer.version>
    </properties>
 
    <build>
        <defaultGoal>spring-boot:run</defaultGoal>
        <plugins>
            <plugin>
                <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
                <artifactId>maven-compiler-plugin</artifactId>
                <configuration>
                    <source>8</source>
                    <target>8</target>
                </configuration>
            </plugin>
            <plugin>
                <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
                <artifactId>spring-boot-maven-plugin</artifactId>
            </plugin>
        </plugins>
    </build>
 
    <dependencies>
        <dependency>
            <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
            <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-webflux</artifactId>
        </dependency>
        <dependency>
            <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
            <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-actuator</artifactId>
        </dependency>
        <dependency>
            <groupId>io.micrometer</groupId>
            <artifactId>micrometer-core</artifactId>
            <version>${micrometer.version}</version>
        </dependency>
        <dependency>
            <groupId>io.micrometer</groupId>
            <artifactId>micrometer-registry-prometheus</artifactId>
            <version>${micrometer.version}</version>
        </dependency>
        <dependency>
            <groupId>org.projectlombok</groupId>
            <artifactId>lombok</artifactId>
            <version>1.18.12</version>
            <scope>provided</scope>
        </dependency>
    </dependencies>
</project>

Then we shall add application.yaml which enables prometheus.

management:
endpoints:
web:
exposure:
include: prometheus

So now we are ready to run the application.

1	`> mvn spring-boot:run`

If we try to access actuator we are gonna be presented with the prometheus endpoint.

> curl http://localhost:8080/actuator
{
  "_links": {
    "self": {
      "href": "http://localhost:8080/actuator",
      "templated": false
    },
    "prometheus": {
      "href": "http://localhost:8080/actuator/prometheus",
      "templated": false
    }
  }
}

This “http://localhost:8080/actuator/prometheus” is the endpoint that our prometheus server would use to pull data.
So our prometheus server needs to be configured to access these data exposed by that endpoint.

On the next blog we shall deploy prometheus and view some metrics.

Published on Java Code Geeks with permission by Emmanouil Gkatziouras, partner at our JCG program. See the original article here: Spring Boot and Micrometer with Prometheus Part 4: The base project

Opinions expressed by Java Code Geeks contributors are their own.