Monitoring microservices using Grafana dashboards
As we already mentioned in the introduction, Kiali provides some very useful dashboards out of the box. In general, they focus on application-level performance metrics such as requests per second, response times, and fault percentages to process requests. As we will see shortly, they are very useful at the application level. But if we want to understand the usage of the underlying hardware resources, we need more detailed metrics, such as Java VM-related ones.
Grafana has an active community that, among other things, shares reusable dashboards. We will try out a dashboard from the community that’s tailored to get a lot of valuable Java VM-related metrics from a Spring Boot application, such as our microservices. Finally, we will learn how to build our own dashboards in Grafana. But let’s start by exploring the dashboards that come out of the box in Kiali and Grafana.
Before we do that, we need to make two preparations...
