Getting started

Overview

Spring Boot Admin is a monitoring tool that aims to visualize information provided by Spring Boot Actuators in a nice and accessible way. It consists of two major parts:

  • A server that provides a user interface to display and interact with Spring Boot Actuators.

  • A client that is used to register at the server and allow to access actuator endpoints.

Quick Start

Since Spring Boot Admin relies on Spring Boot, you have to set up a Spring Boot application first. We recommend doing this by using http://start.spring.io. Spring Boot Admin Server is capable of running as servlet or webflux application, you need to decide on this and add the according Spring Boot Starter. In this example we’re using the servlet web starter.

  1. Add Spring Boot Admin Server starter to your dependencies:

    pom.xml 
    <dependency>
    <groupId>de.codecentric</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-boot-admin-starter-server</artifactId>
    <version>3.2.3</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
    <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-web</artifactId>
</dependency>

  2. Pull in the Spring Boot Admin Server configuration via adding @EnableAdminServer to your configuration:

    @Configuration
@EnableAutoConfiguration
@EnableAdminServer
public class SpringBootAdminApplication {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        SpringApplication.run(SpringBootAdminApplication.class, args);
    }
}
If you want to setup the 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 also adds security.

Registering Client Applications

To register your application at the SBA Server, you can either include the SBA Client or use Spring Cloud Discovery (e.g. Eureka, Consul, …​). There is also a simple option using a static configuration on the SBA Server side.

Spring Boot Admin Client

Each application that wants to register has to include the Spring Boot Admin Client. In order to secure the endpoints, also add the spring-boot-starter-security.

  1. Add spring-boot-admin-starter-client to your dependencies:

    pom.xml 
    <dependency>
    <groupId>de.codecentric</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-boot-admin-starter-client</artifactId>
    <version>3.2.3</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
    <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-security</artifactId>
</dependency>

  2. Enable the SBA Client by configuring the URL of the Spring Boot Admin Server:

    application.properties 
    spring.boot.admin.client.url=http://localhost:8080  (1)
management.endpoints.web.exposure.include=*  (2)
management.info.env.enabled=true (3)
    1 The URL of the Spring Boot Admin Server to register at.
    2 As with Spring Boot 2 most of the endpoints aren’t exposed via http by default, we expose all of them. For production you should carefully choose which endpoints to expose.
    3 Since Spring Boot 2.6, env info contributor is disabled by default. Hence, we have to enable it.

  3. Make the actuator endpoints accessible:

    @Configuration
public static class SecurityPermitAllConfig {
    @Bean
    protected SecurityFilterChain filterChain(HttpSecurity http) {
        return http.authorizeHttpRequests((authorizeRequests) -> authorizeRequests.anyRequest().permitAll())
            .csrf().disable().build();
    }
}
    1 For the sake of brevity we’re disabling the security for now. Have a look at the security section on how to deal with secured endpoints.

Spring Cloud Discovery

If you already use Spring Cloud Discovery for your applications you don’t need the SBA Client. Just add a DiscoveryClient to Spring Boot Admin Server, the rest is done by our AutoConfiguration.

The following steps uses Eureka, but other Spring Cloud Discovery implementations are supported as well. There are examples using Consul and Zookeeper.

Also, have a look at the Spring Cloud documentation.

  1. Add spring-cloud-starter-eureka to your dependencies:

    pom.xml 
    <dependency>
    <groupId>org.springframework.cloud</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-cloud-starter-netflix-eureka-client</artifactId>
</dependency>

  2. Enable discovery by adding @EnableDiscoveryClient to your configuration:

    @Configuration
@EnableAutoConfiguration
@EnableDiscoveryClient
@EnableScheduling
@EnableAdminServer
public class SpringBootAdminApplication {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        SpringApplication.run(SpringBootAdminApplication.class, args);
    }
}

  3. Tell the Eureka client where to find the service registry:

    application.yml 
    eureka:   (1)
  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: ${EUREKA_SERVICE_URL:http://localhost:8761}/eureka/

management:
  endpoints:
    web:
      exposure:
        include: "*"  (2)
  endpoint:
    health:
      show-details: ALWAYS
    1 Configuration section for the Eureka client
    2 As with Spring Boot 2 most of the endpoints aren’t exposed via http by default, we expose all of them. For production you should carefully choose which endpoints to expose.

See also spring-boot-admin-sample-eureka.

You can include the Spring Boot Admin Server to your Eureka server. Setup everything as described above and set spring.boot.admin.context-path to something different than "/" so that the Spring Boot Admin Server UI won’t clash with Eureka’s one.

Use of SNAPSHOT-Versions

If you want to use a snapshot version of Spring Boot Admin Server you most likely need to include the spring and sonatype snapshot repositories:

pom.xml 
<repositories>
    <repository>
        <id>spring-milestone</id>
        <snapshots>
            <enabled>false</enabled>
        </snapshots>
        <url>http://repo.spring.io/milestone</url>
    </repository>
    <repository>
        <id>spring-snapshot</id>
        <snapshots>
            <enabled>true</enabled>
        </snapshots>
        <url>http://repo.spring.io/snapshot</url>
    </repository>
    <repository>
        <id>sonatype-nexus-snapshots</id>
        <name>Sonatype Nexus Snapshots</name>
        <url>https://oss.sonatype.org/content/repositories/snapshots/</url>
        <snapshots>
            <enabled>true</enabled>
        </snapshots>
        <releases>
            <enabled>false</enabled>
        </releases>
    </repository>
</repositories>