PCF Metrics is a powerful free batteries included Application Monitoring and Management tool that is bundled with PCF. It showcases the power of PCF allowing an enterprise to look at one pane of glass for logging and metrics. PCF Metrics if used wisely reduces the cost of leveraging an expensive log aggregation tool like Splunk and eliminate the use of an APM like Dynatrace or AppDynamics or whatever new flavor shows up in the market claiming AIOps.
So let's talk about some concrete uses cases of app developers using PCF Metrics. First of all PCF Metric is a resource hog when it comes to the Tile install. So there will be some sticker shock. You want to install the latest version of PCFMetrics i.e. PCF Metrics 1.6. You will also need to install the Metrics Forwarder tile .
So why do I have to bother with the Metrics Forwarder ? - The metrics forwarder service enables the gathering of fine-grained metrics from the PCF Metrics deployment. The Metrics Forwarder for PCF is a service that allows apps to emit custom metrics to Loggregator and consume those metrics from the Loggregator Firehose. These metrics are then consumed by PCFMetrics via an internal nozzle.
PCF Metrics 1.6 gives you the capability of monitoring custom application metrics and set monitors and alerts on them and graph them on the dashboard. Yes you can define any application metric using micrometer and that metric shows up in the PCF Metrics dashboard. You can set alerts on metrics and have PCF metrics page you on Slack. This applies not only to custom metrics but also to container metrics like HIGH CPU. What this means is that if you have a non cooperative Ops team - then you can control your destiny and be notified immediately via SLACK when your SLO's are violated and can undertake remediation or triage of a situation immediately by taking thread dumps or heap dumps.
How does all this magic work ?
First you need a certain version of the Java Buildpack v 4.2
You can use Spring Boot Actuators to emit metrics to the Metrics Forwarder API. To do this, perform the following steps:
When an app is bound to the Metrics Forwarder service, the app receives credentials and the URL of the Forwarder API. It uses this information to post Spring Boot Actuator metrics to the Metrics Forwarder tile. This configuration data is stored in VCAP_SERVICES environment variables.When you cf push or cf restage the app, the Java buildpack downloads an additional metrics exporter jar, and includes it within the application droplet. When the app is running, the metrics exporter jar now added to the application context reads the Actuator metrics from a metrics registry every minute. It then posts the data to the Metrics Forwarder URL. From there, the Metrics Forwarder service sends this data to Loggregator. PCF Metrics then reads from the Firehose to ingest metrics data for retention and visualization.
How do you add custom metrics to a Spring Boot App ?
Micrometer is the metrics collection facility included in Spring Boot 2’s Actuator. It has also been backported to Spring Boot 1.5, 1.4, and 1.3 with the addition of the micrometer-spring-legacy dependency.
The PCF java buildpack includes a Cloud Foundry Spring Boot Metric Writer that provides an extension to Spring Boot that writes Metrics to a Metric Forwarder service. Here are the gory details
The CloudFoundryMetricWriterAutoConfiguration through spring boot autoconfig magic creates a RestOperationsMetricPublisher that publishes metrics to the Metrics Forwarder API. Therefore in order to publish metrics to PCF Metrics you don't need a micrometer-registry. Core-micrometer is enough to get the metrics published. You don't need to add any additional dependencies for Metric registry extensions. Spring Boot auto-configures a composite MeterRegistry and adds a registry to the composite for each of the supported implementations that it finds on the classpath. In PCF the Java Buildpack is configuring Spring Boot with the PCF Metrics Meter Registry.
You can take action on custom metrics by creating monitors that alert a slack endpoint. See https://docs.pivotal.io/pcf-metrics/1-6/using.html#monitors for configuring the right set of app specific alerts for your application.
For sample code for micrometer metrics in spring boot checkout https://github.com/micrometer-metrics/micrometer-samples-spring-boot and https://spring.io/blog/2018/05/02/spring-tips-metrics-collection-in-spring-boot-2-with-micrometer
Resources
So let's talk about some concrete uses cases of app developers using PCF Metrics. First of all PCF Metric is a resource hog when it comes to the Tile install. So there will be some sticker shock. You want to install the latest version of PCFMetrics i.e. PCF Metrics 1.6. You will also need to install the Metrics Forwarder tile .
So why do I have to bother with the Metrics Forwarder ? - The metrics forwarder service enables the gathering of fine-grained metrics from the PCF Metrics deployment. The Metrics Forwarder for PCF is a service that allows apps to emit custom metrics to Loggregator and consume those metrics from the Loggregator Firehose. These metrics are then consumed by PCFMetrics via an internal nozzle.
PCF Metrics 1.6 gives you the capability of monitoring custom application metrics and set monitors and alerts on them and graph them on the dashboard. Yes you can define any application metric using micrometer and that metric shows up in the PCF Metrics dashboard. You can set alerts on metrics and have PCF metrics page you on Slack. This applies not only to custom metrics but also to container metrics like HIGH CPU. What this means is that if you have a non cooperative Ops team - then you can control your destiny and be notified immediately via SLACK when your SLO's are violated and can undertake remediation or triage of a situation immediately by taking thread dumps or heap dumps.
How does all this magic work ?
First you need a certain version of the Java Buildpack v 4.2
You can use Spring Boot Actuators to emit metrics to the Metrics Forwarder API. To do this, perform the following steps:
- Configure your app to use Spring Boot Actuators.
- Create the Metrics Forwarder (Tile ver. 1.11.3 ) for PCF service.
- Bind your app to the Metrics Forwarder for PCF service.
- Push or restage your app using the Java buildpack v4.2 or later.
When an app is bound to the Metrics Forwarder service, the app receives credentials and the URL of the Forwarder API. It uses this information to post Spring Boot Actuator metrics to the Metrics Forwarder tile. This configuration data is stored in VCAP_SERVICES environment variables.When you cf push or cf restage the app, the Java buildpack downloads an additional metrics exporter jar, and includes it within the application droplet. When the app is running, the metrics exporter jar now added to the application context reads the Actuator metrics from a metrics registry every minute. It then posts the data to the Metrics Forwarder URL. From there, the Metrics Forwarder service sends this data to Loggregator. PCF Metrics then reads from the Firehose to ingest metrics data for retention and visualization.
How do you add custom metrics to a Spring Boot App ?
Micrometer is the metrics collection facility included in Spring Boot 2’s Actuator. It has also been backported to Spring Boot 1.5, 1.4, and 1.3 with the addition of the micrometer-spring-legacy dependency.
The PCF java buildpack includes a Cloud Foundry Spring Boot Metric Writer that provides an extension to Spring Boot that writes Metrics to a Metric Forwarder service. Here are the gory details
The CloudFoundryMetricWriterAutoConfiguration through spring boot autoconfig magic creates a RestOperationsMetricPublisher that publishes metrics to the Metrics Forwarder API. Therefore in order to publish metrics to PCF Metrics you don't need a micrometer-registry. Core-micrometer is enough to get the metrics published. You don't need to add any additional dependencies for Metric registry extensions. Spring Boot auto-configures a composite MeterRegistry and adds a registry to the composite for each of the supported implementations that it finds on the classpath. In PCF the Java Buildpack is configuring Spring Boot with the PCF Metrics Meter Registry.
You can take action on custom metrics by creating monitors that alert a slack endpoint. See https://docs.pivotal.io/pcf-metrics/1-6/using.html#monitors for configuring the right set of app specific alerts for your application.
For sample code for micrometer metrics in spring boot checkout https://github.com/micrometer-metrics/micrometer-samples-spring-boot and https://spring.io/blog/2018/05/02/spring-tips-metrics-collection-in-spring-boot-2-with-micrometer
Resources
- Using PCFMetrics with your apps
- https://docs.pivotal.io/pcf-metrics/1-6/api/monitors.html#view-monitors
- https://docs.spring.io/spring-boot/docs/current/reference/htmlsingle/#production-ready-metrics-getting-started
- https://micrometer.io/docs/ref/spring/1.5
- https://www.baeldung.com/micrometer
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAdxO1XboJY
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