Prometheus is an open-source monitoring and alerting toolkit used in modern software systems like microservices and cloud-native applications.
It works by scraping metrics from instrumented applications at defined intervals and storing them in a time-series database.
Spring Boot Actuator provides various application metrics such as memory usage, thread count, CPU usage, etc., which can be integrated with Micrometer and Prometheus.
Enabling Prometheus in a Spring Boot app allows monitoring, alerting, visualization of metrics in Grafana, tracking usage patterns, and debugging with data-backed insights.
Common use cases for Prometheus integration include monitoring API response times, tracking active threads or connections, checking JVM memory stats, measuring custom business metrics, and enabling auto-scaling decisions.
The step-by-step guide involves creating a Maven project, updating the pom.xml file with dependencies, configuring the application.yml file, defining controller and main application classes, and running the application.
Additionally, configuring Prometheus to read metrics from the Spring Boot app involves defining endpoints in the prometheus.yml file and starting the Prometheus server.
Further steps include running Prometheus server, viewing configured targets, and querying metrics like process_cpu_time_ns_total from the Java Spring Boot application.
Micrometer is highlighted as a metrics instrumentation library for Java applications, offering a unified API to collect and expose application metrics.