In this post, we will introduce the new Prometheus Kie Server Extension, which has been released as part of jBPM version 7.21.0.Final. This extension aims to make extremely easy for you to publish metrics about your Kie Server runtime execution. Using Prometheus and Grafana has become a standard for monitoring cloud services these days, and allowing the Kie Server to expose metrics related to processes, tasks, jobs and more, becomes a powerful integration not only for you to get a snapshot of the current status inside the server but also for combining it with information from different sources such as JVM, Linux and more. Not only in terms of infrastructure monitoring, but it is also a great tool to get insights into the execution of your business process.
To get started with Prometheus, take a look in this overview and the full list of exporters and integrations. Grafana is also another powerful tool that allows you to create nice looking dashboards, combining data from multiple sources, to get started take a look here.
Here is an example based on the metrics exposed from the Kie Server:
To enable this new extension, set the Prometheus system property to org.kie.prometheus.server.ext.disabled=false. When you enable this extension, a series of metrics will be collected, including information about deployments, start time, data sets, execution errors, jobs, tasks, processes, cases, and more. For the complete list of metrics, see the Prometheus services repository on GitHub.
After the extension is started, you can access the available metrics at ${context}/services/rest/metrics.
For example:
curl -u wbadmin:wbadmin http://localhost:8080/kie-server/services/rest/metrics
To quickly demonstrate all the capabilities of this integration, we created a short video, with more details about how to get started, two example dashboards for Grafana, as well as a Docker compose configuration that you can use as a playground to explore all these tools working together.
docker-compose -f jbpm-kie-server-prometheus-grafana.yml up
After all images start, you have the following tools available:
Business Central: http://localhost:8080/business-central
Kie Server: http://localhost:8080/kie-server
Grafana: http://localhost:3000
Prometheus: http://localhost:9090
To access the example dashboards, please login to Grafana using the default credentials: username admin and password admin. Then navigate to Dashboards -> Manage, in there you should have two examples: jBPM Dashboard and jBPM Kie Server Jobs.
As you interact with your Kie Server and Business Central instances, like deploying and starting new process instances, you should notice the metrics values changing in the dashboard. Prometheus is configured to scrape data every 10 seconds.
Hope you have fun monitoring your Kie Server!
