SBA (Spring Boot Admin Server) — Monitoring and Management of Microservice
Suppose you have multiple microservices applications and you want to manage& monitor that such as if a service goes down, an email should trigger or you will get the notification on Slack, Hipchat, or any other. You want to monitor the application health status as well. SBA(Spring Boot Admin server) is the central point where we can achieve it.
The article shows how to set up and use the Spring Boot Admin Server. The sample code of the guide can be found over on GitHub.
What is Spring Boot Admin
Spring Boot Admin server is a web application that is used to manage and monitor your spring boot applications. Each application is considered as a client and registered to the admin server. It is a Codecentric’s community project whose UI is just a Vue.js application on the top of the Spring boot actuators endpoints.
Setting Up SBA
- Setting up Spring Boot Admin Server
First of all, we need to set up the admin server. To do this, just set up a simple spring boot project (using start.spring.io). Spring boot admin server is capable of running as a servlet or web flux application. So we need to add the starter accordingly. In this example, we are using the Servlet web starter.
- Add spring boot admin starter to your dependencies
pom.xml
<dependency>
<groupId>de.codecentric</groupId>
<artifactId>spring-boot-admin-starter-server</artifactId>
<version>2.3.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
<artifactId>spring-boot-starter-web</artifactId>
</dependency>- Pull the spring boot admin server configuration via adding
@EnableAdminServerto your configuration.
@Configuration
@EnableAutoConfiguration
@EnableAdminServer
public class SpringBootAdminApplication {
public static void main(String[] args) {
SpringApplication.run(SpringBootAdminApplication.class, args);
}
}2. Setting up Clients(Register Microservices as a client to SBA)
To register our microservice with the Spring boot admin server, we need to add the following dependency to pom.xml.
- Add spring-boot-admin-starter-client to your dependencies:
pom.xml
<dependency>
<groupId>de.codecentric</groupId>
<artifactId>spring-boot-admin-starter-client</artifactId>
<version>2.3.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
</dependency>- Enable the SBA Client by configuring the URL of the Spring Boot Admin Server:
application.properties
spring.boot.admin.client.url=http://localhost:8080
management.endpoints.web.exposure.include=*You should carefully consider which monitoring endpoints you want to expose as they can expose sensitive data.
SBA Dashboard
Notifications(Mail,Slack,Hipchat, Let’s Chat,MSTems etc)
Spring boot admin(SBA) supports sending notifications from the admin server if something happens with our registered client state such as client service goes down etc.
It supports the following notifications platforms :
- PagerDuty
- OpdGenie
- Hipchat
- Slack
- Let’s chat
- Microsoft Teams
- Telegram
- Discord
For example, we will integrate Email and test if the Admin Server correctly sends a notification about service is DOWN.
For that, you just need to let the admin server know about the email channel.
Now, we restart the admin server and simply shut down one of our client services. We receive a email notification correctly.
Security
The spring boot admin server exposes the sensitive data(metric endpoints) of the registered client. Currently, these are not secured and can be accessed by anyone. To prevent this we can use spring security.
By default spring-boot-admin-server-ui provides a login page and a logout button.
Sever :
First, we will focus on securing the server application. We need to add the starter dependency of spring security and dependency of the admin server login module.
pom.xml
<dependency>
<groupId>de.codecentric</groupId>
<artifactId>spring-boot-admin-server-ui-login</artifactId>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
<artifactId>spring-boot-starter-security</artifactId>
</dependency>Now the security has been enabled and the login interface has been added to the admin application. Then add spring security configuration to secure the application.
You will also need to add an initial user to access the pages. Add the following to application.properties:
application.properties
spring.security.user.name=admin
spring.security.user.password=testClient:
To make client registerable, we need to provide these credentials in the application.properties file:
application.properties
spring.boot.admin.client.username=admin
spring.boot.admin.client.password=test
Conclusion
In this article, we discussed the simple steps that have to do, in order to monitor and manage the microservices with SBA server. Also, you learned, each spring boot application has to declare itself as a client and provide the admin server URL in the configuration. After this admin server UI displays useful information about each of the client applications.
The sample code of this guide can be found over GitHub.
SpringBootAdmin resources
You can refer to the official documentation from here SpringBootAdmin documentation.
