Spring Boot Admin – Admin UI for administration of spring boot applications

Posted on June 18, 2017 by Siva Prasad Rao Janapati — Leave a comment

As part of microservices development, many of us are using Spring Boot along with Spring Cloud features. In the microservices world, we will have many Spring Boot applications which will be running on same/different hosts. If we add Spring Actuator to the Spring Boot applications, we will get a lot of out of the box endpoints to monitor and interact with Spring Boot applications. The list is given below.

ID	Description	Sensitive Default
`actuator`	Provides a hypermedia-based “discovery page” for the other endpoints. Requires Spring HATEOAS to be on the classpath.	true
`auditevents`	Exposes audit events information for the current application.	true
`autoconfig`	Displays an auto-configuration report showing all auto-configuration candidates and the reason why they ‘were’ or ‘were not’ applied.	true
`beans`	Displays a complete list of all the Spring beans in your application.	true
`configprops`	Displays a collated list of all `@ConfigurationProperties`.	true
`dump`	Performs a thread dump.	true
`env`	Exposes properties from Spring’s `ConfigurableEnvironment`.	true
`flyway`	Shows any Flyway database migrations that have been applied.	true
`health`	Shows application health information (when the application is secure, a simple ‘status’ when accessed over an unauthenticated connection or full message details when authenticated).	false
`info`	Displays arbitrary application info.	false
`loggers`	Shows and modifies the configuration of loggers in the application.	true
`liquibase`	Shows any Liquibase database migrations that have been applied.	true
`metrics`	Shows ‘metrics’ information for the current application.	true
`mappings`	Displays a collated list of all `@RequestMapping` paths.	true
`shutdown`	Allows the application to be gracefully shutdown (not enabled by default).	true
`trace`	Displays trace information (by default the last 100 HTTP requests).	true

The above endpoints provide a lot of insights about Spring Boot application. But If you have many applications running then monitoring each application by hitting the endpoints and inspecting the JSON response is a tedious process. To avoid this hassle Code Centric team came up with Spring Boot Admin module which will provide us Admin UI Dashboard to administer Spring Boot applications. This module crunches the data from Actuator endpoints and provides insights about all the registered applications in a single dashboard. Now we will demonstrate the Spring Boot Admin features in the following sections.

As a first step, create a Spring Boot application which we will make as Spring Boot Admin server module by adding the below maven dependencies.

	<dependency>
	<groupId>de.codecentric</groupId>
	<artifactId>spring-boot-admin-server</artifactId>
	<version>1.5.1</version>
	</dependency>
	<dependency>
	<groupId>de.codecentric</groupId>
	<artifactId>spring-boot-admin-server-ui</artifactId>
	<version>1.5.1</version>
	</dependency>

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Spring Boot Admin Server Dependencies

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Add Spring Boot Admin Server configuration via adding @EnableAdminServer to your configuration.

	package org.samrttechie;

	import org.springframework.boot.SpringApplication;
	import org.springframework.boot.autoconfigure.SpringBootApplication;
	import org.springframework.context.annotation.Configuration;
	import org.springframework.security.config.annotation.web.builders.HttpSecurity;
	import org.springframework.security.config.annotation.web.configuration.WebSecurityConfigurerAdapter;

	import de.codecentric.boot.admin.config.EnableAdminServer;

	@EnableAdminServer
	@Configuration
	@SpringBootApplication
	public class SpringBootAdminApplication {

	public static void main(String[] args) {
	SpringApplication.run(SpringBootAdminApplication.class, args);
	}

	@Configuration
	public static class SecurityConfig extends WebSecurityConfigurerAdapter {
	@Override
	protected void configure(HttpSecurity http) throws Exception {
	// Page with login form is served as /login.html and does a POST on /login
	http.formLogin().loginPage("/login.html").loginProcessingUrl("/login").permitAll();
	// The UI does a POST on /logout on logout
	http.logout().logoutUrl("/logout");
	// The ui currently doesn't support csrf
	http.csrf().disable();

	// Requests for the login page and the static assets are allowed
	http.authorizeRequests()
	.antMatchers("/login.html", "/*/.css", "/img/", "/third-party/")
	.permitAll();
	// … and any other request needs to be authorized
	http.authorizeRequests().antMatchers("/**").authenticated();

	// Enable so that the clients can authenticate via HTTP basic for registering
	http.httpBasic();
	}
	}
	// end::configuration-spring-security[]

	}

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Spring Boot Admin Server

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Let us create more Spring Boot applications to monitor via the Spring Boot Admin server created in the above steps. All the Spring Boot applications which will create now will be acted as Spring Boot Admin clients. To make application as Admin client, add the below dependency along with actuator dependency. In this demo, I have created three applications like Eureka Server, Customer Service, and Order Service.

	<dependency>
	<groupId>de.codecentric</groupId>
	<artifactId>spring-boot-admin-starter-client</artifactId>
	<version>1.5.1</version>
	</dependency>
	<dependency>
	<groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
	<artifactId>spring-boot-starter-actuator</artifactId>
	</dependency>

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Spring Boot Admin Client

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Add below property to application.properties file. This property tells where the Spring Boot Admin server is running. Hence the clients will register with the server.

spring.boot.admin.url=http://localhost:1111

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Spring Boot Admin Client Configuration

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Now If we start the Admin Server and other Spring Boot applications we can able to see all the admin clients information in the Admin server dashboard. As we started our admin server on 1111 port in this example we can see dash-board at http ://<host_name>:1111. Below is the screenshot of the Admin Server UI.

Detailed view of an application is given below. In this view, we can see the tail of the log file, metrics, environment variables, log configuration where we can dynamically switch the log levels at the component level, root level or package level and other information.

Now we will see another feature called notifications from Spring Boot Admin. This will notify the administrators when the application status is DOWN or application status is coming UP. Spring Boot admin supports the below channels to notify the user.

Email Notifications
Pagerduty Notifications
Hipchat Notifications
Slack Notifications
Let’s Chat Notifications

In this article, we will configure Slack notifications. Add the below properties to the Spring Boot Admin Server’s application.properties file.

	spring.boot.admin.notify.slack.webhook-url=https://hooks.slack.com/services/T8787879tttr/B5UM0989988L/0000990999VD1hVt7Go1eL //Slack Webhook URL of a channel
	spring.boot.admin.notify.slack.message="#{application.name} is #{to.status}" //Message to appear in the channel

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Slack Notifications

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With Spring Boot Admin we are managing all the applications. So we need to secure Spring Boot Admin UI with login feature. Let us enable login feature to Spring Boot Admin server. Here I am going with basic authentication. Add below maven dependencies to the Admin Server module.

	<dependency>
	<groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
	<artifactId>spring-boot-starter-security</artifactId>
	</dependency>
	<dependency>
	<groupId>de.codecentric</groupId>
	<artifactId>spring-boot-admin-server-ui-login</artifactId>
	<version>1.5.1</version>
	</dependency>

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Spring Boot Admin Server Login

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Add the below properties to the application.properties file.

	security.user.name=admin //user name to authenticate
	security.user.password=admin123 //Password to authenticate

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Spring Admin Server Security

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As we added security to the Admin Server, Admin clients should be able to connect to the server by authenticating. Hence add the below properties to the Admin client’s application.properties files.

	spring.boot.admin.username=admin
	spring.boot.admin.password=admin123

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Spring Boot Admin Client Authentication

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There are additional UI features like Hystrix, Turbine UI which we can enable to the dashboard. You can find more details here. The sample code created for this demonstration is available on Github.

About Siva Prasad Rao Janapati

Siva Janapati is an Architect with experience in building Cloud Native Microservices architectures, Reactive Systems, Large scale distributed systems, and Serverless Systems. Siva has hands-on in architecture, design, and implementation of scalable systems using Cloud, Java, Go lang, Apache Kafka, Apache Solr, Spring, Spring Boot, Lightbend reactive tech stack, APIGEE edge & on-premise and other open-source, proprietary technologies. Expertise working with and building RESTful, GraphQL APIs. He has successfully delivered multiple applications in retail, telco, and financial services domains. He manages the GitHub(https://github.com/2013techsmarts) where he put the source code of his work related to his blog posts.