Monitoring PingCentral - PingCentral

The Spring Boot Actuator, enabled by default, collects a wide variety of information to help you monitor and manage PingCentral in production environments and can be connected to your time series database in a few simple steps.

Spring Actuator data and Spring Metrics can be accessed at their respective endpoints:

https://localhost:9022/actuator/
https://localhost:9022/actuator/metrics

Actuator data includes:

Endpoint	Usage
/beans	Displays a list of the Spring beans in PingCentral.
/caches	Displays a list of available caches.
/conditions	Displays the conditions that were evaluated on configuration and auto-configuration.
/configprops	Displays a list of configuration properties.
/env	Displays a list of environment properties.
/environmentConnectivity	Returns a list of environments in PingCentral and their connectivity statuses.
/environmentConnectivity/ <`environmentName`>	Returns connectivity status of the specified environment.
/health	Displays health check information regarding PingCentral.
/heapdump	Used to perform a heap dump.
/info	Displays general information about PingCentral, such as the vendor and version number.
/liquidbase	Displays information regarding database migrations that have been applied.
/loggers	Displays the logger configuration for PingCentral.
/mappings	Displays a collated list of all @RequestMapping paths.
/scheduledtasks	Displays the scheduled tasks within PingCentral.
/threaddump	Used to perform a thread dump.

Metrics data includes a wide variety of information, such as the amount of JVM (Java Virtual Machine) memory used, the number of Jetty threads used, and the amount of time it takes to complete processes. Counters and timers are also available for most API endpoints. Counters count the number of times an endpoint is hit, and timers measure the amount of time it takes for events to occur.

Spring Metrics collects a large amount of data, but it does not present the data in ways that are easy to understand. Consequently, many choose to move this data to either a Prometheus or Graphite time series database and use Grafana to view it through interactive dashboards with charts and graphs.

Because Graphite supports only counters, but Prometheus supports both counters and timers, Prometheus is the preferred choice. See the following topics for instructions on setting up one of these time series databases to communicate with PingCentral.

Setting up Prometheus using basic authorization
Setting up Prometheus using OAuth
Setting up Graphite
Setting up Grafana
Accessing Prometheus and Grafana

Setting up Prometheus using basic authorization

Prometheus pulls information from PingCentral endpoints and stores the data it retrieves.

In PingCentral, in the conf/application.properties file, which resides in the PingCentral installation directory, locate and define the following properties.
```
management.metrics.export.prometheus.enabled=true
management.metrics.export.prometheus.step=5s
```
Save and close the file.
Restart PingCentral.

Set up the Prometheus prometheus.yaml configuration file and save it in the appropriate location.

The following example uses the prometheus.yaml file locally with basic_auth:

global:
scrape_interval: 15s # Set the scrape interval to every 15 seconds. Default is every 1 minute.
# scrape_timeout is set to the global default (10s).

# A scrape configuration containing exactly one endpoint to scrape:
# Here it's Prometheus itself.
scrape_configs:
# Metrics for PingCentral
  - job_name: 'pingcentral-metrics' 
    honor_timestamps: false 
    metrics_path: */actuator/prometheus' 
    scrape_interval: 5s 
    scheme: https 
    static_configs:
      - targets: [ 'xxx.xxx.x.x:9022' ]
    basic_auth:
      username: Administrator 
      password: 2Federate 
     tls_config:
       insecure_skip_verify: true

Important:

Use insecure_skip_verification: true exclusively in development or test environments.

Access Prometheus.

For more information, see Get started with Grafana and Prometheus in the Grafana documentation.

Setting up Prometheus using OAuth

Prometheus pulls information from PingCentral endpoints and stores the data it retrieves.

Enable single sign-on (SSO) with OpenID Connect (OIDC) in PingCentral's application.properties file.
Register an OAuth client in an authorization server with grant_type = client_credentials. Include the claims: 'sub', 'aud', and 'PingCentral-Role' in an issued access_token.
Configure the Resource Server section in the application.properties file.

For more information, see Setting up SSO for PingCentral.

To configure Prometheus to connect to PingCentral with OAuth credentials:

In PingCentral, in the conf/application.properties file, which resides in the PingCentral installation directory, locate and define the following properties.
```
management.metrics.export.prometheus.enabled=true
management.metrics.export.prometheus.step=5s
```
Save and close the file.
Restart PingCentral.

Set up the Prometheus prometheus.yaml configuration file and save it in the appropriate location.

To use an OAuth access token, use your OAuth credentials as configured in PingFederate or your third party authorization server. See the following example:

global:
scrape_interval: 15s # Set the scrape interval to every 15 seconds. Default is every 1 minute.
# scrape_timeout is set to the global default (10s).

# A scrape configuration containing exactly one endpoint to scrape:
# Here it's Prometheus itself.
scrape_configs:
# Metrics for PingCentral
  - job_name: 'pingcentral-metrics' 
    honor_timestamps: false 
    metrics_path: */actuator/prometheus' 
    scrape_interval: 5s 
    scheme: https 
    static_configs:
      - targets: [ 'xxx.xxx.x.x:9022' ]
    oauth2: 
      client_id: prometheusPCClient 
      client_secret: srZS9odxQF7m1tHUkUMcPvtSyz4P8XzVhy3CKn7VOOsBODYtBspRl2AXtExG2Q4Z 
      scopes: 
        - pc-admin-api 
      token_url: https://pingfederate:9031/as/token.oauth2 
    tls_config: 
      insecure_skip_verify: true

Important:

Use insecure_skip_verification: true exclusively in development or test environments.

Access Prometheus.

For more information, see Get started with Grafana and Prometheus in the Grafana documentation.

Setting up Graphite

Use PingCentral to push data to the Graphite time series database.

In PingCentral, in the conf/application.properties file, which resides in the PingCentral installation directory, locate and define the following properties.

management.metrics.export.graphite.step=5s
management.metrics.export.graphite.enabled=true
management.metrics.export.graphite.host=127.0.0.1
management.metrics.export.graphite.port=2004

Save and close the file.
Restart PingCentral.
PingCentral automatically starts pushing data to Graphite.

Accessing Prometheus and Grafana

At Ping, we use Prometheus and Grafana to monitor PingCentral in our Docker PingCentral deployment in our CI/CD.

To access Prometheus and Grafana, use URLs that reflect their installation locations using the following format:

Prometheus:: To ensure Prometheus is correctly gathering metrics from PingCentral, use
Grafana:

Setting up Grafana

Use Grafana with either Graphite or Prometheus to view data through interactive dashboards with charts and graphs.

Connect Grafana to either Prometheus or Graphite by adding a data source with the information shown in this example.

Note:
The URL you enter in the URL field should reflect the location of your time series database.
Click Save and Test.
Access Grafana.

For more information, see Accessing Prometheus and Grafana.