Actuador de arranque de resorte

Programación

1. Información general

En este artículo, presentamos el actuador Spring Boot. Primero cubriremos los conceptos básicos, luego discutiremos en detalle qué está disponible en Spring Boot 2.x vs 1.x.

Aprenderemos a usar, configurar y extender esta herramienta de monitoreo en Spring Boot 2.xy WebFlux, aprovechando el modelo de programación reactiva. Luego discutiremos cómo hacer lo mismo usando Boot 1.x.

Spring Boot Actuator está disponible desde abril de 2014, junto con la primera versión de Spring Boot.

Con el lanzamiento de Spring Boot 2, Actuator se rediseñó y se agregaron nuevos puntos finales emocionantes.

Dividimos esta guía en tres secciones principales:

  • ¿Qué es un actuador?
  • Actuador Spring Boot 2.x
  • Actuador Spring Boot 1.x

2. ¿Qué es un actuador?

En esencia, Actuator trae características listas para producción a nuestra aplicación.

Monitorear nuestra aplicación, recopilar métricas, comprender el tráfico o el estado de nuestra base de datos se vuelve trivial con esta dependencia.

El principal beneficio de esta biblioteca es que podemos obtener herramientas de nivel de producción sin tener que implementar estas funciones nosotros mismos.

El actuador se utiliza principalmente para exponer información operativa sobre la aplicación en ejecución : estado, métricas, información, volcado, env, etc. Utiliza puntos finales HTTP o beans JMX para permitirnos interactuar con ella.

Una vez que esta dependencia está en la ruta de clases, varios puntos finales están disponibles para nosotros desde el primer momento. Como ocurre con la mayoría de los módulos Spring, podemos configurarlo o ampliarlo fácilmente de muchas formas.

2.1. Empezando

Para habilitar Spring Boot Actuator, solo necesitamos agregar la dependencia spring-boot-actuator a nuestro administrador de paquetes.

En Maven:

 org.springframework.boot spring-boot-starter-actuator

Tenga en cuenta que esto sigue siendo válido independientemente de la versión de arranque, ya que las versiones se especifican en la lista de materiales (BOM) de Spring Boot.

3. Actuador Spring Boot 2.x

En 2.x, Actuator mantiene su propósito fundamental, pero simplifica su modelo, amplía sus capacidades e incorpora mejores valores predeterminados.

Primero, esta versión se vuelve independiente de la tecnología. También simplifica su modelo de seguridad al fusionarlo con el de la aplicación.

Entre los diversos cambios, es importante tener en cuenta que algunos de ellos se están rompiendo. Esto incluye solicitudes y respuestas HTTP, así como API de Java.

Por último, la última versión ahora es compatible con el modelo CRUD en lugar del modelo anterior de lectura / escritura.

3.1. Soporte Tecnológico

Con su segunda versión principal, Actuator ahora es independiente de la tecnología, mientras que en 1.x estaba vinculado a MVC, por lo tanto a la API de Servlet.

En 2.x, Actuator define su modelo como conectable y extensible sin depender de MVC para esto.

Por lo tanto, con este nuevo modelo, podemos aprovechar MVC y WebFlux como tecnología web subyacente.

Además, se podrían agregar tecnologías futuras implementando los adaptadores adecuados.

Finalmente, JMX sigue siendo compatible para exponer puntos finales sin ningún código adicional.

3.2. Cambios importantes

A diferencia de las versiones anteriores, Actuator viene con la mayoría de los puntos finales deshabilitados.

Por lo tanto, los únicos dos disponibles por defecto son / health y / info .

Si queremos habilitarlos todos, podríamos configurar management.endpoints.web.exposure.include = * . Alternativamente, podemos enumerar los puntos finales que deben habilitarse.

Actuator ahora comparte la configuración de seguridad con las reglas de seguridad habituales de la aplicación, por lo que el modelo de seguridad se simplifica drásticamente.

Por lo tanto, para modificar las reglas de seguridad del actuador, podríamos simplemente agregar una entrada para / actuator / ** :

@Bean public SecurityWebFilterChain securityWebFilterChain( ServerHttpSecurity http) { return http.authorizeExchange() .pathMatchers("/actuator/**").permitAll() .anyExchange().authenticated() .and().build(); }

Podemos encontrar más detalles en los nuevos documentos oficiales de Actuator.

Además, de forma predeterminada, todos los puntos finales del actuador ahora se colocan bajo la ruta / actuator .

Al igual que en la versión anterior, podemos modificar esta ruta utilizando la nueva propiedad management.endpoints.web.base-path .

3.3. Puntos finales predefinidos

Echemos un vistazo a algunos puntos finales disponibles, la mayoría de los cuales ya estaban disponibles en 1.x.

Además, se han agregado algunos puntos finales , algunos se han eliminado y algunos se han reestructurado :

  • / auditevents enumera los eventos relacionados con la auditoría de seguridad, como el inicio / cierre de sesión del usuario. Además, podemos filtrar por principal o tipo entre otros campos.
  • / beans devuelve todos los beans disponibles en nuestra BeanFactory . A diferencia de / auditevents , no admite filtrado.
  • / conditions , anteriormente conocido como / autoconfig , crea un informe de las condiciones en torno a la autoconfiguración.
  • / configprops nos permite recuperar todos los beans de @ConfigurationProperties .
  • /env returns the current environment properties. Additionally, we can retrieve single properties.
  • /flyway provides details about our Flyway database migrations.
  • /health summarizes the health status of our application.
  • /heapdump builds and returns a heap dump from the JVM used by our application.
  • /info returns general information. It might be custom data, build information or details about the latest commit.
  • /liquibase behaves like /flyway but for Liquibase.
  • /logfile returns ordinary application logs.
  • /loggers enables us to query and modify the logging level of our application.
  • /metrics details metrics of our application. This might include generic metrics as well as custom ones.
  • /prometheus returns metrics like the previous one, but formatted to work with a Prometheus server.
  • /scheduledtasks provides details about every scheduled task within our application.
  • /sessions lists HTTP sessions given we are using Spring Session.
  • /shutdown performs a graceful shutdown of the application.
  • /threaddump dumps the thread information of the underlying JVM.

3.4. Hypermedia for Actuator Endpoints

Spring Boot adds a discovery endpoint that returns links to all available actuator endpoints. This will facilitate discovering actuator endpoints and their corresponding URLs.

By default, this discovery endpoint is accessible through the /actuator endpoint.

Therefore, if we send a GET request to this URL, it'll return the actuator links for the various endpoints:

{ "_links": { "self": { "href": "//localhost:8080/actuator", "templated": false }, "features-arg0": { "href": "//localhost:8080/actuator/features/{arg0}", "templated": true }, "features": { "href": "//localhost:8080/actuator/features", "templated": false }, "beans": { "href": "//localhost:8080/actuator/beans", "templated": false }, "caches-cache": { "href": "//localhost:8080/actuator/caches/{cache}", "templated": true }, // truncated }

As shown above, the /actuator endpoint reports all available actuator endpoints under the _links field.

Moreover, if we configure a custom management base path, then we should use that base path as the discovery URL.

For instance, if we set the management.endpoints.web.base-path to /mgmt, then we should send a request to the /mgmt endpoint to see the list of links.

Quite interestingly, when the management base path is set to /, the discovery endpoint is disabled to prevent the possibility of a clash with other mappings.

3.5. Health Indicators

Just like in the previous version, we can add custom indicators easily. Opposite to other APIs, the abstractions for creating custom health endpoints remain unchanged. However, a new interface, ReactiveHealthIndicator, has been added to implement reactive health checks.

Let's have a look at a simple custom reactive health check:

@Component public class DownstreamServiceHealthIndicator implements ReactiveHealthIndicator { @Override public Mono health() { return checkDownstreamServiceHealth().onErrorResume( ex -> Mono.just(new Health.Builder().down(ex).build()) ); } private Mono checkDownstreamServiceHealth() { // we could use WebClient to check health reactively return Mono.just(new Health.Builder().up().build()); } }

A handy feature of health indicators is that we can aggregate them as part of a hierarchy.

So, following the previous example, we could group all downstream services under a downstream-services category. This category would be healthy as long as every nested service was reachable.

Check out our article on health indicators for a more in-depth look.

3.6. Health Groups

As of Spring Boot 2.2, we can organize health indicators into groups and apply the same configuration to all the group members.

For example, we can create a health group named custom by adding this to our application.properties:

management.endpoint.health.group.custom.include=diskSpace,ping

This way, the custom group contains the diskSpace and ping health indicators.

Now if we call the /actuator/health endpoint, it would tell us about the new health group in the JSON response:

{"status":"UP","groups":["custom"]}

With health groups, we can see the aggregated results of a few health indicators.

In this case, if we send a request to /actuator/health/custom, then:

{"status":"UP"}

We can configure the group to show more details via application.properties:

management.endpoint.health.group.custom.show-components=always management.endpoint.health.group.custom.show-details=always

Now if we send the same request to /actuator/health/custom, we'll see more details:

{ "status": "UP", "components": { "diskSpace": { "status": "UP", "details": { "total": 499963170816, "free": 91300069376, "threshold": 10485760 } }, "ping": { "status": "UP" } } }

It's also possible to show these details only for authorized users:

management.endpoint.health.group.custom.show-components=when_authorized management.endpoint.health.group.custom.show-details=when_authorized

We can also have a custom status mapping.

For instance, instead of an HTTP 200 OK response, it can return a 207 status code:

management.endpoint.health.group.custom.status.http-mapping.up=207

Here, we're telling Spring Boot to return a 207 HTTP status code if the custom group status is UP.

3.7. Metrics in Spring Boot 2

In Spring Boot 2.0, the in-house metrics were replaced with Micrometer support, so we can expect breaking changes. If our application was using metric services such as GaugeService or CounterService, they will no longer be available.

Instead, we're expected to interact with Micrometer directly. In Spring Boot 2.0, we'll get a bean of type MeterRegistry autoconfigured for us.

Furthermore, Micrometer is now part of Actuator's dependencies, so we should be good to go as long as the Actuator dependency is in the classpath.

Moreover, we'll get a completely new response from the /metrics endpoint:

{ "names": [ "jvm.gc.pause", "jvm.buffer.memory.used", "jvm.memory.used", "jvm.buffer.count", // ... ] }

As we can see, there are no actual metrics as we got in 1.x.

To get the actual value of a specific metric, we can now navigate to the desired metric, e.g., /actuator/metrics/jvm.gc.pause, and get a detailed response:

{ "name": "jvm.gc.pause", "measurements": [ { "statistic": "Count", "value": 3.0 }, { "statistic": "TotalTime", "value": 7.9E7 }, { "statistic": "Max", "value": 7.9E7 } ], "availableTags": [ { "tag": "cause", "values": [ "Metadata GC Threshold", "Allocation Failure" ] }, { "tag": "action", "values": [ "end of minor GC", "end of major GC" ] } ] }

Now metrics are much more thorough, including not only different values but also some associated metadata.

3.8. Customizing the /info Endpoint

The /info endpoint remains unchanged. As before, we can add git details using the respective Maven or Gradle dependency:

 pl.project13.maven git-commit-id-plugin

Likewise, we could also include build information including name, group, and version using the Maven or Gradle plugin:

 org.springframework.boot spring-boot-maven-plugin    build-info

3.9. Creating a Custom Endpoint

As we pointed out previously, we can create custom endpoints. However, Spring Boot 2 has redesigned the way to achieve this to support the new technology-agnostic paradigm.

Let's create an Actuator endpoint to query, enable, and disable feature flags in our application:

@Component @Endpoint(id = "features") public class FeaturesEndpoint { private Map features = new ConcurrentHashMap(); @ReadOperation public Map features() { return features; } @ReadOperation public Feature feature(@Selector String name) { return features.get(name); } @WriteOperation public void configureFeature(@Selector String name, Feature feature) { features.put(name, feature); } @DeleteOperation public void deleteFeature(@Selector String name) { features.remove(name); } public static class Feature { private Boolean enabled; // [...] getters and setters } }

To get the endpoint, we need a bean. In our example, we're using @Component for this. Also, we need to decorate this bean with @Endpoint.

The path of our endpoint is determined by the id parameter of @Endpoint. In our case, it'll route requests to /actuator/features.

Once ready, we can start defining operations using:

  • @ReadOperation: It'll map to HTTP GET.
  • @WriteOperation: It'll map to HTTP POST.
  • @DeleteOperation: It'll map to HTTP DELETE.

When we run the application with the previous endpoint in our application, Spring Boot will register it.

A quick way to verify this is to check the logs:

[...].WebFluxEndpointHandlerMapping: Mapped "{[/actuator/features/{name}], methods=[GET], produces=[application/vnd.spring-boot.actuator.v2+json || application/json]}" [...].WebFluxEndpointHandlerMapping : Mapped " application/json]" [...].WebFluxEndpointHandlerMapping : Mapped "{[/actuator/features/{name}], methods=[POST], consumes=[application/vnd.spring-boot.actuator.v2+json || application/json]}" [...].WebFluxEndpointHandlerMapping : Mapped "{[/actuator/features/{name}], methods=[DELETE]}"[...]

In the previous logs, we can see how WebFlux is exposing our new endpoint. If we switch to MVC, it'll simply delegate on that technology without having to change any code.

Also, we have a few important considerations to keep in mind with this new approach:

  • There are no dependencies with MVC.
  • All the metadata present as methods before (sensitive, enabled…) no longer exist. We can, however, enable or disable the endpoint using @Endpoint(id = “features”, enableByDefault = false).
  • Unlike in 1.x, there is no need to extend a given interface anymore.
  • In contrast with the old read/write model, we can now define DELETE operations using @DeleteOperation.

3.10. Extending Existing Endpoints

Let's imagine we want to make sure the production instance of our application is never a SNAPSHOT version.

We decide to do this by changing the HTTP status code of the Actuator endpoint that returns this information, i.e., /info. If our app happened to be a SNAPSHOT, we would get a different HTTP status code.

We can easily extend the behavior of a predefined endpoint using the @EndpointExtension annotations, or its more concrete specializations @EndpointWebExtension or @EndpointJmxExtension:

@Component @EndpointWebExtension(endpoint = InfoEndpoint.class) public class InfoWebEndpointExtension { private InfoEndpoint delegate; // standard constructor @ReadOperation public WebEndpointResponse info() { Map info = this.delegate.info(); Integer status = getStatus(info); return new WebEndpointResponse(info, status); } private Integer getStatus(Map info) { // return 5xx if this is a snapshot return 200; } }

3.11. Enable All Endpoints

In order to access the actuator endpoints using HTTP, we need to both enable and expose them.

By default, all endpoints but /shutdown are enabled. Only the /health and /info endpoints are exposed by default.

We need to add the following configuration to expose all endpoints:

management.endpoints.web.exposure.include=*

To explicitly enable a specific endpoint (e.g., /shutdown), we use:

management.endpoint.shutdown.enabled=true

To expose all enabled endpoints except one (e.g., /loggers), we use:

management.endpoints.web.exposure.include=* management.endpoints.web.exposure.exclude=loggers

4. Spring Boot 1.x Actuator

In 1.x, Actuator follows a read/write model, which means we can either read from it or write to it.

For example, we can retrieve metrics or the health of our application. Alternatively, we could gracefully terminate our app or change our logging configuration.

In order to get it working, Actuator requires Spring MVC to expose its endpoints through HTTP. No other technology is supported.

4.1. Endpoints

In 1.x, Actuator brings its own security model. It takes advantage of Spring Security constructs but needs to be configured independently from the rest of the application.

Also, most endpoints are sensitive — meaning they're not fully public, or most information will be omitted — while a handful are not, e.g., /info.

Here are some of the most common endpoints Boot provides out of the box:

  • /health shows application health information (a simple status when accessed over an unauthenticated connection or full message details when authenticated); it's not sensitive by default.
  • /info displays arbitrary application info; it's not sensitive by default.
  • /metrics shows metrics information for the current application; it's sensitive by default.
  • /trace displays trace information (by default the last few HTTP requests).

We can find the full list of existing endpoints over on the official docs.

4.2. Configuring Existing Endpoints

We can customize each endpoint with properties using the format endpoints.[endpoint name].[property to customize].

Three properties are available:

  • id: by which this endpoint will be accessed over HTTP
  • enabled: if true, then it can be accessed; otherwise not
  • sensitive: if true, then need the authorization to show crucial information over HTTP

For example, adding the following properties will customize the /beans endpoint:

endpoints.beans.id=springbeans endpoints.beans.sensitive=false endpoints.beans.enabled=true

4.3. /health Endpoint

The /health endpoint is used to check the health or state of the running application.

It's usually exercised by monitoring software to alert us if the running instance goes down or gets unhealthy for other reasons, e.g., connectivity issues with our DB, lack of disk space, etc.

By default, unauthorized users can only see status information when they access over HTTP:

{ "status" : "UP" }

This health information is collected from all the beans implementing the HealthIndicator interface configured in our application context.

Some information returned by HealthIndicator is sensitive in nature, but we can configure endpoints.health.sensitive=false to expose more detailed information like disk space, messaging broker connectivity, custom checks, and more.

Note that this only works for Spring Boot versions below 1.5.0. For 1.5.0 and later versions, we should also disable security by setting management.security.enabled=false for unauthorized access.

We could also implement our own custom health indicator, which can collect any type of custom health data specific to the application and automatically expose it through the /health endpoint:

@Component("myHealthCheck") public class HealthCheck implements HealthIndicator { @Override public Health health() { int errorCode = check(); // perform some specific health check if (errorCode != 0) { return Health.down() .withDetail("Error Code", errorCode).build(); } return Health.up().build(); } public int check() { // Our logic to check health return 0; } }

Here's how the output would look:

{ "status" : "DOWN", "myHealthCheck" : { "status" : "DOWN", "Error Code" : 1 }, "diskSpace" : { "status" : "UP", "free" : 209047318528, "threshold" : 10485760 } }

4.4. /info Endpoint

We can also customize the data shown by the /info endpoint:

info.app.name=Spring Sample Application info.app.description=This is my first spring boot application info.app.version=1.0.0

And the sample output:

{ "app" : { "version" : "1.0.0", "description" : "This is my first spring boot application", "name" : "Spring Sample Application" } }

4.5. /metrics Endpoint

The metrics endpoint publishes information about OS and JVM as well as application-level metrics. Once enabled, we get information such as memory, heap, processors, threads, classes loaded, classes unloaded, and thread pools along with some HTTP metrics as well.

Here's what the output of this endpoint looks like out of the box:

{ "mem" : 193024, "mem.free" : 87693, "processors" : 4, "instance.uptime" : 305027, "uptime" : 307077, "systemload.average" : 0.11, "heap.committed" : 193024, "heap.init" : 124928, "heap.used" : 105330, "heap" : 1764352, "threads.peak" : 22, "threads.daemon" : 19, "threads" : 22, "classes" : 5819, "classes.loaded" : 5819, "classes.unloaded" : 0, "gc.ps_scavenge.count" : 7, "gc.ps_scavenge.time" : 54, "gc.ps_marksweep.count" : 1, "gc.ps_marksweep.time" : 44, "httpsessions.max" : -1, "httpsessions.active" : 0, "counter.status.200.root" : 1, "gauge.response.root" : 37.0 }

In order to gather custom metrics, we have support for gauges (single-value snapshots of data) and counters, i.e., incrementing/decrementing metrics.

Let's implement our own custom metrics into the /metrics endpoint.

We'll customize the login flow to record a successful and failed login attempt:

@Service public class LoginServiceImpl { private final CounterService counterService; public LoginServiceImpl(CounterService counterService) { this.counterService = counterService; } public boolean login(String userName, char[] password) { boolean success; if (userName.equals("admin") && "secret".toCharArray().equals(password)) { counterService.increment("counter.login.success"); success = true; } else { counterService.increment("counter.login.failure"); success = false; } return success; } }

Here's what the output might look like:

{ ... "counter.login.success" : 105, "counter.login.failure" : 12, ... }

Note that login attempts and other security-related events are available out of the box in Actuator as audit events.

4.6. Creating a New Endpoint

In addition to using the existing endpoints provided by Spring Boot, we can also create an entirely new one.

First, we need to have the new endpoint implement the Endpoint interface:

@Component public class CustomEndpoint implements Endpoint
     
       { @Override public String getId() { return "customEndpoint"; } @Override public boolean isEnabled() { return true; } @Override public boolean isSensitive() { return true; } @Override public List invoke() { // Custom logic to build the output List messages = new ArrayList(); messages.add("This is message 1"); messages.add("This is message 2"); return messages; } }

In order to access this new endpoint, its id is used to map it. In other words we could exercise it hitting /customEndpoint.

Output:

[ "This is message 1", "This is message 2" ]

4.7. Further Customization

For security purposes, we might choose to expose the actuator endpoints over a non-standard port — the management.port property can easily be used to configure that.

Also, as we already mentioned, in 1.x. Actuator configures its own security model based on Spring Security but independent from the rest of the application.

Hence, we can change the management.address property to restrict where the endpoints can be accessed from over the network:

#port used to expose actuator management.port=8081 #CIDR allowed to hit actuator management.address=127.0.0.1 #Whether security should be enabled or disabled altogether management.security.enabled=false

Besides, all the built-in endpoints except /info are sensitive by default.

If the application is using Spring Security, we can secure these endpoints by defining the default security properties (username, password, and role) in the application.properties file:

security.user.name=admin security.user.password=secret management.security.role=SUPERUSER

5. Conclusion

In this article, we talked about Spring Boot Actuator. We began by defining what Actuator means and what it does for us.

Next, we focused on Actuator for the current Spring Boot version 2.x, discussing how to use it, tweak it, and extend it. We also talked about the important security changes that we can find in this new iteration. We discussed some popular endpoints and how they have changed as well.

Then we discussed Actuator in the earlier Spring Boot 1 version.

Lastly, we demonstrated how to customize and extend Actuator.

As always, the code used in this article can be found over on GitHub for both Spring Boot 2.x and Spring Boot 1.x.