Monitoring PingCentral

PingCentral
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pingcentral-19
ft:publication_title
PingCentral
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PingCentral 1.9
category
Administrator
Audience
Developer
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pc-19
pingcentral
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Page created: 8 Oct 2021 |
Page updated: 21 Apr 2022
| 2 min read

1.9 Product PingCentral Developer Audience Administrator

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

Page created: 8 Oct 2021 |
Page updated: 21 Apr 2022
| 1 min read

1.9 Product PingCentral Developer Audience Administrator

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

  1. 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
  2. Save and close the file.
  3. Restart PingCentral.
  4. Set up the Prometheus prometheus.yaml configuration file and save it in the appropriate location.
    In this example, the following prometheus.yaml file is used locally.

  5. Access Prometheus.

    For more information, see Accessing Prometheus and Grafana.

Setting up Graphite

Page created: 8 Oct 2021 |
Page updated: 21 Apr 2022
| 1 min read

1.9 Product PingCentral Developer Audience Administrator

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

  1. 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
  2. Save and close the file.
  3. Restart PingCentral.
    PingCentral automatically starts pushing data to Graphite.

Accessing Prometheus and Grafana

Page created: 8 Oct 2021 |
Page updated: 21 Apr 2022
| 1 min read

1.9 Product PingCentral Developer Audience Administrator

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

Page created: 8 Oct 2021 |
Page updated: 21 Apr 2022
| 1 min read

1.9 Product PingCentral Developer Audience Administrator

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

  1. Connect Grafana to either Prometheus or Graphite by adding a data source with the information shown in this example.
    This screen capture displays the following URL in the URL field: http://172.17.0.1.9090.
    Note:

    The URL you enter in the URL field should reflect the location of your time series database.

  2. Click Save and Test.
  3. Access Grafana.

    For more information, see Accessing Prometheus and Grafana.