Installation and Setup
Overview
Spring Boot Admin works by registering Spring Boot applications that expose Actuator endpoints. Each application's health and metrics data is polled by Spring Boot Admin Server, which aggregates and displays this information in a web dashboard. The registered applications can either self-register or be discovered using service discovery tools like Eureka or Consul. Through the dashboard, users can monitor the health, memory usage, logs, and more for each application, and even interact with them via management endpoints for tasks like restarting or updating configurations.
Motivation
In modern microservices architecture, monitoring and managing distributed systems is complex and challenging. Spring Boot Admin provides a powerful solution for visualizing, monitoring, and managing Spring Boot applications in real-time. By offering a web interface that aggregates the health and metrics of all attached services, Spring Boot Admin simplifies the process of ensuring system stability and performance. Whether you need insights into application health, memory usage, or log output, Spring Boot Admin offers a centralized tool that streamlines operational management, helping developers and DevOps teams maintain robust and efficient applications.
While Spring Boot Admin offers a user-friendly and centralized interface for monitoring Spring Boot applications, it is not designed to replace sophisticated, full-scale monitoring and observability tools like Grafana, Datadog, or Instana. These tools provide advanced capabilities such as real-time alerting, history data, complex metric analysis, distributed tracing, and customizable dashboards across diverse environments.
Spring Boot Admin excels at providing a lightweight, application-centric view with essential health checks, metrics, and management endpoints. For production-grade observability in larger, more complex systems, integrating Spring Boot Admin alongside these advanced platforms ensures comprehensive system monitoring and deep insights.
Quick Start
Since Spring Boot Admin is built on top of Spring Boot, you'll need to set up a Spring Boot application first. We recommend using http://start.spring.io for easy project setup. The Spring Boot Admin Server can run as either in a Servlet or WebFlux application, so you'll need to choose one and add the corresponding Spring Boot Starter. In this example, we'll use the Servlet Web Starter.
Setting up the Spring Boot Admin Server
To set up Spring Boot Admin Server, you need to add the dependency spring-boot-admin-starter-server as well as
spring-boot-starter-web to your project (either in your pom.xml or build.gradle(.kts)).
<project>
<dependency>
<groupId>de.codecentric</groupId>
<artifactId>spring-boot-admin-starter-server</artifactId>
<version>3.4.2-SNAPSHOT</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
<artifactId>spring-boot-starter-web</artifactId>
</dependency>
</project>
After that, you need to annotate your main class with @EnableAdminServer to enable the Spring Boot Admin Server.
This will load all required configuration at runtime by leveraging Springs' autodiscovery feature.
@SpringBootApplication
@EnableAdminServer
public class SpringBootAdminApplication {
public static void main(String[] args) {
SpringApplication.run(SpringBootAdminApplication.class, args);
}
}
After starting your application, you can now access the Spring Boot Admin Server web interface at
http://localhost:8080.
If you want to set up Spring Boot Admin Server via war-deployment in a servlet-container, please have a look at the spring-boot-admin-sample-war.
See also the spring-boot-admin-sample-servlet project, which adds security.
Registering Applications
To register your application at the server, you can either include the Spring Boot Admin Client or use Spring Cloud Discovery (e.g. Eureka, Consul, …). There is also an option to use static configuration on server side.
Using Spring Boot Admin Client
Each application that is not using Spring Cloud features but wants to register at the server has to include the Spring Boot Admin Client as dependency.
<project>
<dependency>
<groupId>de.codecentric</groupId>
<artifactId>spring-boot-admin-starter-client</artifactId>
<version>3.4.2-SNAPSHOT</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
<artifactId>spring-boot-starter-security</artifactId>
</dependency>
</project>
After adding the dependency, you need to configure the URL of the Spring Boot Admin Server in your
application.properties or application.yml file as follows:
spring.boot.admin.client.url=http://localhost:8080 #1
management.endpoints.web.exposure.include=* #2
management.info.env.enabled=true #3
- This property defines the URL of the Spring Boot Admin Server.
- As with Spring Boot 2 most of the endpoints aren’t exposed via http by default, but we want to expose all of them.
For production, you should carefully choose which endpoints to expose and keep security in mind. It is also possible
to use a different port for the actuator endpoints by setting
management.portproperty. - Since Spring Boot 2.6, the info actuator endpoint is disabled by default. In our case, we enable it to provide additional information to the Spring Boot Admin Server.
When you start your monitored application now, it will register itself at the Spring Boot Admin Server. You can see your app in the web interface of Spring Boot Admin.
It is possible to add sprinb-boot-admin-client as well as spring-boot-admin-server to the same application. This
allows you to monitor the Spring Boot Admin Server itself. To get a more realistic setup, you should run the Spring Boot
Admin Server and clients in separate applications.
Using Spring Cloud Discovery
If you already use Spring Cloud Discovery in your application architecture you don’t need to add Spring Boot Admin Client. In this case you can leverage the Spring Cloud features by adding a DiscoveryClient to Spring Boot Admin Server.
The following steps uses Eureka, but other Spring Cloud Discovery implementations are supported as well. There are examples for Consul and Zookeeper.
Since Spring Boot Admin Server is fully build on top of Spring Cloud features and uses its discovery mechanism, please refer to the Spring Cloud documentation for more information.
To start using Eureka, you need to add the following dependencies to your project:
<dependency>
<groupId>org.springframework.cloud</groupId>
<artifactId>spring-cloud-starter-netflix-eureka-client</artifactId>
</dependency>
After that, you have to enable discovery by adding @EnableDiscoveryClient to your configuration:
@EnableDiscoveryClient
@SpringBootApplication
@EnableAdminServer
public class SpringBootAdminApplication {
public static void main(String[] args) {
SpringApplication.run(SpringBootAdminApplication.class, args);
}
}
The next step is to configure the Eureka client in your application.yml file and define the URL of Eureka's service
registry.
spring:
application:
name: spring-boot-admin-sample-eureka
profiles:
active:
- secure
eureka:
instance:
leaseRenewalIntervalInSeconds: 10
health-check-url-path: /actuator/health
metadata-map:
startup: ${random.int} # needed to trigger info and endpoint update after restart
client:
registryFetchIntervalSeconds: 5
serviceUrl:
defaultZone: http://localhost:8761/eureka/
management:
endpoints:
web:
exposure:
include: "*"
endpoint:
health:
show-details: ALWAYS
There is also a basic example in Spring Boot Admin's GitHub repository using Eureka.
You can include the Spring Boot Admin Server to your Eureka server as well. Setup everything as described above and set
spring.boot.admin.context-path to something different from / so that the Spring Boot Admin Server UI won’t clash
with
Eureka’s one.