Monitor infrastructure

Grafana integrations

Integrations reference

Spring Boot

Grafana Cloud

Spring Boot integration for Grafana Cloud

Spring Boot is Spring’s convention-over-configuration solution for creating stand-alone, production-grade Spring-based Applications. This integration enables the agent to send metrics to Grafana Cloud along with a useful default dashboard for visualization.

The provided dashboard is a modified version of the Spring Boot Statistics community dashboard.

This integration includes 1 pre-built dashboard to help monitor and visualize Spring Boot metrics.

Before you begin

The Spring Boot application must have the actuator enabled.

Please see the demo application for details.

We have added a custom label to the dashboard to help you observe multiple applications. To use it, make sure to add a line of code like the following in your @SpringBootApplication class to include an application label to your metrics. Please change MYAPPNAME value accordingly. This is also present in the demo application.

@Bean
MeterRegistryCustomizer<MeterRegistry> metricsCommonTags() {
    return registry -> registry.config().commonTags("application", "MYAPPNAME");
}

Install Spring Boot integration for Grafana Cloud

In your Grafana Cloud stack, click Connections in the left-hand menu.
Find Spring Boot and click its tile to open the integration.
Review the prerequisites in the Configuration Details tab and set up Grafana Agent to send Spring Boot metrics to your Grafana Cloud instance.
Click Install to add this integration’s pre-built dashboard to your Grafana Cloud instance, and you can start monitoring your Spring Boot setup.

Configuration snippets for Grafana Alloy

Simple mode

These snippets are configured to scrape a single Spring Boot instance running locally with default ports.

First, manually copy and append the following snippets into your alloy configuration file.

Metrics snippets

discovery.relabel "metrics_integrations_integrations_spring_boot" {
	targets = [{
		__address__ = "localhost:1235",
	}]

	rule {
		target_label = "instance"
		replacement  = constants.hostname
	}
}

prometheus.scrape "metrics_integrations_integrations_spring_boot" {
	targets      = discovery.relabel.metrics_integrations_integrations_spring_boot.output
	forward_to   = [prometheus.remote_write.metrics_service.receiver]
	job_name     = "integrations/spring-boot"
	metrics_path = "/actuator/prometheus"
}

Advanced mode

The following snippets provide examples to guide you through the configuration process.

To instruct Grafana Alloy to scrape your Spring Boot instances, manually copy and append the snippets to your alloy configuration file, then follow subsequent instructions.

Advanced metrics snippets

discovery.relabel "metrics_integrations_integrations_spring_boot" {
	targets = [{
		__address__ = "localhost:1235",
	}]

	rule {
		target_label = "instance"
		replacement  = constants.hostname
	}
}

prometheus.scrape "metrics_integrations_integrations_spring_boot" {
	targets      = discovery.relabel.metrics_integrations_integrations_spring_boot.output
	forward_to   = [prometheus.remote_write.metrics_service.receiver]
	job_name     = "integrations/spring-boot"
	metrics_path = "/actuator/prometheus"
}

To monitor your Spring Boot instance, you must use a discovery.relabel component to discover your Spring Boot Prometheus endpoint and apply appropriate labels, followed by a prometheus.scrape component to scrape it.

Configure the following properties within each discovery.relabel component:

__address__: The address to your Spring Boot Prometheus metrics endpoint.
instance label: constants.hostname sets the instance label to your Grafana Alloy server hostname. If that is not suitable, change it to a value uniquely identifies this Spring Boot instance.

If you have multiple Spring Boot servers to scrape, configure one discovery.relabel for each and scrape them by including each under targets within the prometheus.scrape component.

Grafana Agent static configuration (deprecated)

The following section shows configuration for running Grafana Agent in static mode which is deprecated. You should use Grafana Alloy for all new deployments.

Before you begin

The Spring Boot application must have the actuator enabled.

Please see the demo application for details.

@Bean
MeterRegistryCustomizer<MeterRegistry> metricsCommonTags() {
    return registry -> registry.config().commonTags("application", "MYAPPNAME");
}

Install Spring Boot integration for Grafana Cloud

In your Grafana Cloud stack, click Connections in the left-hand menu.
Find Spring Boot and click its tile to open the integration.
Review the prerequisites in the Configuration Details tab and set up Grafana Agent to send Spring Boot metrics to your Grafana Cloud instance.
Click Install to add this integration’s pre-built dashboard to your Grafana Cloud instance, and you can start monitoring your Spring Boot setup.

Post-install configuration for the Spring Boot integration

After enabling the metrics generation, instruct Grafana Agent to scrape your Spring Boot application.

Actuator exposes a /actuator/prometheus endpoint. To scrape it, add the provided snippet to your agent configuration file.

Make sure to change targets in the snippet according to your environment.

Configuration snippets for Grafana Agent

Below metrics.configs.scrape_configs, insert the following lines and change the URLs according to your environment:

    - job_name: integrations/spring-boot
      relabel_configs:
        - replacement: '<your-instance-name>'
          target_label: instance
      static_configs:
        - targets: ['localhost:1235']
      metrics_path: /actuator/prometheus

Full example configuration for Grafana Agent

Refer to the following Grafana Agent configuration for a complete example that contains all the snippets used for the Spring Boot integration. This example also includes metrics that are sent to monitor your Grafana Agent instance.

integrations:
  prometheus_remote_write:
  - basic_auth:
      password: <your_prom_pass>
      username: <your_prom_user>
    url: <your_prom_url>
  agent:
    enabled: true
    relabel_configs:
    - action: replace
      source_labels:
      - agent_hostname
      target_label: instance
    - action: replace
      target_label: job
      replacement: "integrations/agent-check"
    metric_relabel_configs:
    - action: keep
      regex: (prometheus_target_sync_length_seconds_sum|prometheus_target_scrapes_.*|prometheus_target_interval.*|prometheus_sd_discovered_targets|agent_build.*|agent_wal_samples_appended_total|process_start_time_seconds)
      source_labels:
      - __name__
  # Add here any snippet that belongs to the `integrations` section.
  # For a correct indentation, paste snippets copied from Grafana Cloud at the beginning of the line.
logs:
  configs:
  - clients:
    - basic_auth:
        password: <your_loki_pass>
        username: <your_loki_user>
      url: <your_loki_url>
    name: integrations
    positions:
      filename: /tmp/positions.yaml
    scrape_configs:
      # Add here any snippet that belongs to the `logs.configs.scrape_configs` section.
      # For a correct indentation, paste snippets copied from Grafana Cloud at the beginning of the line.
metrics:
  configs:
  - name: integrations
    remote_write:
    - basic_auth:
        password: <your_prom_pass>
        username: <your_prom_user>
      url: <your_prom_url>
    scrape_configs:
      # Add here any snippet that belongs to the `metrics.configs.scrape_configs` section.
      # For a correct indentation, paste snippets copied from Grafana Cloud at the beginning of the line.
    - job_name: integrations/spring-boot
      relabel_configs:
        - replacement: '<your-instance-name>'
          target_label: instance
      static_configs:
        - targets: ['localhost:1235']
      metrics_path: /actuator/prometheus
  global:
    scrape_interval: 60s
  wal_directory: /tmp/grafana-agent-wal

Dashboards

The Spring Boot integration installs the following dashboards in your Grafana Cloud instance to help monitor your system.

Spring Boot Statistics

Spring Boot Statistics

Metrics

The most important metrics provided by the Spring Boot integration, which are used on the pre-built dashboard, are as follows:

hikaricp_connections
hikaricp_connections_acquire_seconds_count
hikaricp_connections_acquire_seconds_sum
hikaricp_connections_active
hikaricp_connections_creation_seconds_count
hikaricp_connections_creation_seconds_sum
hikaricp_connections_idle
hikaricp_connections_pending
hikaricp_connections_timeout_total
hikaricp_connections_usage_seconds_count
hikaricp_connections_usage_seconds_sum
http_server_requests_seconds_count
http_server_requests_seconds_sum
jvm_buffer_memory_used_bytes
jvm_buffer_total_capacity_bytes
jvm_classes_loaded_classes
jvm_classes_unloaded_classes_total
jvm_gc_memory_allocated_bytes_total
jvm_gc_memory_promoted_bytes_total
jvm_gc_pause_seconds_count
jvm_gc_pause_seconds_sum
jvm_memory_committed_bytes
jvm_memory_max_bytes
jvm_memory_used_bytes
jvm_threads_daemon_threads
jvm_threads_live_threads
jvm_threads_peak_threads
logback_events_total
process_cpu_usage
process_files_max_files
process_files_open_files
process_start_time_seconds
process_uptime_seconds
system_cpu_count
system_cpu_usage
system_load_average_1m
tomcat_global_error_total
tomcat_global_received_bytes_total
tomcat_global_sent_bytes_total
tomcat_sessions_active_current_sessions
tomcat_threads_busy
tomcat_threads_config_max_threads
tomcat_threads_current_threads
up

Changelog

# 1.0.0 - January 2024

* Make exception label matcher case insensitive in Response time panel
* Update version number for stable release

# 0.0.6 - November 2023

* Replaced Angular dashboard panels with React panels

# 0.0.5 - September 2023

* New Filter Metrics option for configuring the Grafana Agent, which saves on metrics cost by dropping any metric not used by this integration. Beware that anything custom built using metrics that are not on the snippet will stop working.
* New hostname relabel option, which applies the instance name you write on the text box to the Grafana Agent configuration snippets, making it easier and less error prone to configure this mandatory label.

# 0.0.4 - January 2023

* Adding Job filter and making filters All and Multi selectable

# 0.0.3 - September 2022

* Update dashboard panels descriptions.

# 0.0.2 - October 2021

* Update mixin to latest version:
  - Update queries to use $__rate_interval

# 0.0.1 - December 2020

* Initial release

Cost

By connecting your Spring Boot instance to Grafana Cloud, you might incur charges. To view information on the number of active series that your Grafana Cloud account uses for metrics included in each Cloud tier, see Active series and dpm usage and Cloud tier pricing.