Administration of spring boot applications using spring boot admin.

This includes health status, various metrics, log level management, JMX-Beans interaction, thread dumps and traces, and much more. Spring Boot Admin is a community project initiated and maintained by code-centric.

Spring boot admin will provide UI to monitor and do some administrative work for your spring boot applications.

This project has been started by codecentric and its open source. You can do your own customization if you want to.

Git Repo: Link

The above video will give you a better idea of what is this project, so we will directly start with an example.

Spring Boot provides actuator endpoints to monitor metrics of individual microservices. These endpoints are very helpful for getting information about applications like if they are up if their components like database etc are working well. But a major drawback or difficulty about using actuator endpoints is that we have to individually hit the endpoints for applications to know their status or health. Imagine microservices involving 150 applications, the admin will have to hit the actuator endpoints of all 150 applications. To help us to deal with this situation we are using Spring Boot Admin app.

Sample Code:

To implement this we will create two projects one is server and another is the client.

1. Spring Boot Admin server.
2. Spring Boot Admin client.

Spring Boot Admin Server:

The project structure should look like any spring boot application:

POM.xml

<?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>

	<groupId>com.techwasti</groupId>
	<artifactId>spring-boot-admin</artifactId>
	<version>0.0.1-SNAPSHOT</version>
	<packaging>jar</packaging>

	<name>spring-boot-admin</name>
	<description>Demo project for Spring Boot</description>

	<parent>
		<groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
		<artifactId>spring-boot-starter-parent</artifactId>
		<version>1.5.4.RELEASE</version>
		<relativePath /> <!-- lookup parent from repository -->
	</parent>

	<properties>
		<project.build.sourceEncoding>UTF-8</project.build.sourceEncoding>
		<project.reporting.outputEncoding>UTF-8</project.reporting.outputEncoding>
		<java.version>1.8</java.version>
	</properties>

	<dependencies>
<!-- admin dependency-->
		<dependency>
			<groupId>de.codecentric</groupId>
			<artifactId>spring-boot-admin-server-ui-login</artifactId>
			<version>1.5.1</version>
		</dependency>
		<dependency>
			<groupId>de.codecentric</groupId>
			<artifactId>spring-boot-admin-server</artifactId>
			<version>1.5.1</version>
		</dependency>
		<dependency>
			<groupId>de.codecentric</groupId>
			<artifactId>spring-boot-admin-server-ui</artifactId>
			<version>1.5.1</version>
		</dependency><!-- end admin dependency-->
		<dependency>
			<groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
			<artifactId>spring-boot-starter</artifactId>
		</dependency>
		<dependency>
			<groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
			<artifactId>spring-boot-starter-security</artifactId>
		</dependency>

	</dependencies>

	<build>
		<plugins>
			<plugin>
				<groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
				<artifactId>spring-boot-maven-plugin</artifactId>
			</plugin>
		</plugins>
	</build>


</project>

We need to configure security as well since we are accessing sensitive information:

package com.techwasti;

import org.springframework.boot.SpringApplication;
import org.springframework.boot.autoconfigure.SpringBootApplication;
import org.springframework.context.annotation.Configuration;
import org.springframework.security.config.annotation.web.builders.HttpSecurity;
import org.springframework.security.config.annotation.web.configuration.WebSecurityConfigurerAdapter;

import de.codecentric.boot.admin.config.EnableAdminServer;

@EnableAdminServer
@Configuration
@SpringBootApplication
public class SpringBootAdminApplication {

	public static void main(String[] args) {
		SpringApplication.run(SpringBootAdminApplication.class, args);
	}

	@Configuration
	public static class SecurityConfig extends WebSecurityConfigurerAdapter {
		@Override
		protected void configure(HttpSecurity http) throws Exception {
			http.formLogin().loginPage("/login.html").loginProcessingUrl("/login").permitAll();
			http.logout().logoutUrl("/logout");
			http.csrf().disable();

			http.authorizeRequests().antMatchers("/login.html", "/**/*.css", "/img/**", "/third-party/**").permitAll();
			http.authorizeRequests().antMatchers("/**").authenticated();

			http.httpBasic();
		}
	}

}

application.propertie file content

spring.application.name=SpringBootAdminEx
server.port=8081
security.user.name=admin
security.user.password=admin

Run the app and localhost:8081

Enter username and password and click on login button

As this is a sample example so we hardcoded username and password but you can use spring security to integrate LDAP or any other security.

Spring Boot Admin can be configured to display only the information that we consider useful.

spring.boot.admin.routes.endpoints=env, metrics, trace, info, configprops

Notifications and Alerts:

We can notify and send alerts using any below channels.

• Email
• PagerDuty
• OpsGenie
• Hipchat
• Slack
• Let’s Chat

Spring Boot Admin Client:

Now we are ready with the admin server application let us create the client application. Create any HelloWorld spring boot application or if you have any existing spring boot app you can use the same as a client application.

Add below Maven dependency

<dependency>
			<groupId>de.codecentric</groupId>
			<artifactId>spring-boot-admin-starter-client</artifactId>
			<version>1.5.1</version>
		</dependency>
		<dependency>
			<groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
			<artifactId>spring-boot-starter-actuator</artifactId>
		</dependency>

Next, update application.properties and add the following properties

spring.boot.admin.url=http://localhost:8081
spring.boot.admin.username=admin
spring.boot.admin.password=admin

These changes are fine in your client application now run the client application. Once the client application is up and running go and check your admin server application. It will show all your applications.

Beautiful Dashboards:

Spring boot admin is providing a wide range of features. As part of this article, we have just listed very few dig deeper and explore more.