Introduction

Actuator is a Blueriq component which enables metrics and statistics about the Runtime. It is based on Spring Boot Actuator which helps you monitor and manage your application by providing a number of endpoints. The table below summarizes the Spring Boot Actuator endpoints which are enabled in the Runtime. Besides those, there are a number of Blueriq specific actuator endpoints. It is recommended to not expose actuator endpoints via the load balancer/firewall to the public and thereby only make them accessible from inside the network.

Actuator ID	Endpoint	Description
auditevents	/actuator/auditevents	Exposes audit events information for the current application
beans	/actuator/beans	Displays a complete list of all the Spring beans present in runtime
conditions	/actuator/conditions	Shows the conditions that were evaluated on configuration and auto-configuration classes and the reasons why they did or did not match
configprops	/actuator/configprops	Displays the used runtime properties
env	/actuator/env	Displays all the profiles, runtime properties, system properties and environment variables
health	/actuator/health	Shows runtime health information
httptrace	/actuator/httptrace	Displays information about the last x HTTP requests (By default x=100)
info	/actuator/info	Displays information about the runtime. Currently displays the list of unhandled exceptions
logfile	/actuator/logfile	Returns the contents of the log file (if configured through `logging.file.name`)
loggers	/actuator/loggers	Displays and modifies the configuration of loggers in the application
mappings	/actuator/mappings	Displays a collated list of all `@RequestMapping` paths
metrics	/actuator/metrics	Displays various metrics about the runtime. Both standard Spring Boot metrics and Blueriq specific metrics are displayed
threaddump	/actuator/threaddump	Performs a thread dump.

Enable component

To enable Blueriq Actuators add the Spring profile named actuator in file . For example:

 spring.profiles.active=native,actuator

Starting with Release 13, the refresh endpoint should be both enabled and exposed when the development-tools profile is active, otherwise the runtime will not start.

Context path

The default path for Blueriq Actuators is /actuator. This can be changed to a different path with the management.endpoints.web.base-path property:

management.endpoints.web.base-path=/somethingElse

If the runtime is accessible via https://localhost:8080/Runtime, the actuators can be found at https://localhost:8080/Runtime/actuator by default, or at http://localhost:8080/Runtime/somethingElse if the property above would be set.

Exposing endpoints

All enabled endpoints are available through both JMX and HTTP. (except for the logfile endpoint, which is only available through HTTP). You should limit the access to the endpoint to not be accessible from the public network. To customize this, you can change the following properties.

Property	Blueriq default
`management.endpoints.jmx.exposure.exclude`
`management.endpoints.jmx.exposure.include`	`*`
`management.endpoints.web.exposure.exclude`
`management.endpoints.web.exposure.include`	`*`

So for instance to disable exposing all the endpoints but the health endpoint via JMX, add the following property.

management.endpoints.jmx.exposure.include=health

In this example all endpoints are still exposed via HTTP.

Starting with Release 13, JMX is disabled by default. You can reenable it by setting the property spring.jmx.enabled to true.

Security

By default all actuators are secured using basic authentication. In order to access actuator endpoints, the authenticated user must have the role 'ACTUATOR'. When using the development tools component, this user can be defined in the users.properties file.

admin={noop}welcome,ACTUATOR

Enable/disable default security

When more control over the security of individual endpoints is required, a custom implementation can be written.
For this, you first need to disable the default security for the actuators. This can be done by setting the property blueriq.security.actuator.enabled in application-actuator.properties. If you don't specify this property, security will be enabled.

# Security
blueriq.security.actuator.enabled=false

Implementing custom security for actuator endpoints

By default, all users need to have the role ACTUATOR to acces the actuator pages. In the following example, the endpoints actuator/health and actuator/info are available to all, but the CUSTOM_ROLE is required to access the other actuator endpoints. This can be done by disabling the default security for actuator, and implement your own custom SecurityConfigurer like in the example below.

@Configuration
@ConditionalOnProperty(name = "blueriq.security.actuator.enabled", havingValue = "false", matchIfMissing = false)
public class CustomMetricsApiSecurityConfigurer extends WebSecurityConfigurerAdapter {
 
	// 1. Inject any required dependencies
    @Autowired
    private WebEndpointProperties webEndpointProperties;
 
	@Autowired
	@Qualifier("blueriqAuthenticationManager")
	private AuthenticationManager authenticationManager;
 
	// 2. Specify the authentication manager
	@Override
	public AuthenticationManager authenticationManager() throws Exception {
		return authenticationManager;
	}
 
	// 3. Configure HTTP security
	@Override
	protected void configure(HttpSecurity http) throws Exception {
	 http.antMatcher(webEndpointProperties.getBasePath() + "/**")
        .authorizeRequests()
			.requestMatchers(EndpointRequest.to(HealthEndpoint.class, InfoEndpoint.class)).permitAll() 
	        .requestMatchers(EndpointRequest.toAnyEndpoint()).hasRole("CUSTOM_ROLE");
	}
}

Enable/Disable individual endpoints

Each endpoint can be enabled or disabled via a property with the format management.endpoint.[endpoint-id].enabled=true/false

# Enable all endpoints
management.endpoints.enabled-by-default=true

Actuator Endpoints

For a complete overview of the standard Spring Boot Actuator web API, which described example request and responses for all actuator endpoints, have a look at the documentation.

Info

The standard info

GET http://localhost:92/Runtime/actuator/info

{
    "exceptions": [
        {
            "cause": null,
            "stackTrace": [
                {
                    "methodName": "getInternalFlow",
                    "fileName": "FlowEngine.java",
                    "lineNumber": 269,
                    "className": "com.aquima.interactions.flow.model.FlowEngine",
                    "nativeMethod": false
                },
                {
                    "methodName": "startFlow",
                    "fileName": "FlowEngine.java",
                    "lineNumber": 130,
                    "className": "com.aquima.interactions.flow.model.FlowEngine",
                    "nativeMethod": false
                }
... 
            ],
            "flowName": "main",
            "message": "Unknown flow: main",
            "localizedMessage": "Unknown flow: main",
            "suppressed": []
        }
    ]
}

Metrics

Navigating to /Runtime/actuator/metrics displays a list of available metrics. You can drill down to view information about a particular metric by providing its name as a selector, e.g. /actuator/metrics/jvm.memory.max

GET http://localhost:92/Runtime/actuator/metrics

{
"names": [
	"jvm.buffer.memory.used",
	"jvm.memory.used",
	"jvm.gc.memory.allocated",
	"jvm.memory.committed",
	"jvm.gc.max.data.size",
	"logback.events",
	"system.cpu.count",
	"runtime.session.counter",
	"jvm.memory.max",
	"jvm.buffer.total.capacity",
	"jvm.buffer.count",
	"jvm.threads.daemon",
	"process.start.time",
	"runtime.average.compose.time",
	"runtime.request.counter",
	"jvm.gc.live.data.size",
	"process.cpu.usage",
	"jvm.gc.pause",
	"process.uptime",
	"runtime.average.event.time",
	"runtime.exceptions.counter",
	"http.server.requests",
	"system.cpu.usage",
	"jvm.threads.live",
	"jvm.threads.peak",
	"jvm.gc.memory.promoted"
]
}

Blueriq specific metrics

The following Runtime specific metrics are available.

Metric	Description
runtime.request.counter	Counts the total number of request for the UI REST API ( /server/* )
runtime.exceptions.counter	Counts the number of unhandled exceptions
runtime.session.counter	Counts the number of portal sessions currently in the runtime
gauge.portal-session.page.compose.average-time	Measures the average page compose time in milliseconds
gauge.response.portal-session.handle-event	Measures the average time for handling portal session events in milliseconds

The metrics are per node. When running in a cluster the counter.portal-session metric will not be displayed

Blueriq specific endpoints

With the endpoints below you can reset some of the Blueriq specific metrics provided by the metrics endpoint.

Reset Runtime Requests

POST http://localhost:92/Runtime/actuator/runtime-reset-request-count

runtime.request.counter was reset

Reset Portal-Session Exceptions

POST http://localhost:92/Runtime/actuator/portal-session-reset-exceptions

runtime.exceptions.counter was reset

Reset Portal-Session Compose Time

POST http://localhost:92/Runtime/actuator/portal-session-reset-compose-time

gauge.portal-session.page.compose.average-time was reset

Reset Portal-Session Handle-Event Time

POST http://localhost:92/Runtime/actuator/portal-session-reset-handle-event

gauge.response.portal-session.handle-event was reset