Spring boot Actuator vs prometheus Jmx exporter

Question

For exporting the metrics (to Prometheus) from the spring boot micro service, we can use the spring boot actuator and one more option is to use the Prometheus JMX exporter( https://github.com/prometheus/jmx_exporter ) as a javaAgent when running the service. Though both of the options serve the same purpose, I do see that the JMX exporter is exporting way lot more metrics than the spring boot actuator. I was scouting through some spring boot documentations to see if there is any option to enable more metrics with spring boot actuator, looks like all the JMX metrics are enabled by default. So the questions is, is there a way to expose more metrics from spring boot actuator? Is there any recommendation or comparison study available for both the options mentioned above?

Any help here is greatly appreciated. Thanks!

Answer 1

If you are using Spring boot 2.x, then it works like this:

In Spring Boot 2.0, the in-house metrics were replaced with Micrometer support, so we can expect breaking changes. If our application was using metric services such as GaugeService or CounterService, they will no longer be available. Instead, we're expected to interact with Micrometer directly. In Spring Boot 2.0, we'll get a bean of type MeterRegistry autoconfigured for us.

for Spring boot 1.x:

The metrics endpoint publishes information about OS and JVM as well as application-level metrics. Once enabled, we get information such as memory, heap, processors, threads, classes loaded, classes unloaded, and thread pools along with some HTTP metrics as well.

and this seems to work like Prometheus JMX