What is everyone using for metrics? I need a simpl...

# ktor

[Marcin Wisniowski]

What is everyone using for metrics? I need a simple dashboard with some graphs and counters to see some stats / the volume of hits for my ktor API.

[Ben]

Micrometer for publishing the metrics. For viewing the dashboards you have a ton of options

[Marcin Wisniowski]

I've looked into Micrometer but it seems all dashboards are a paid SaaS, and all self-hosted/open-source dashboards are very old. Is there no Micrometer compatible dashboard that is free to self-host while being a modern, maintained open source project? Maybe I ask for too much but I'd like to know if there is something I am missing.

[Ben]

Micrometer is just a facade around the different formats so if there is an open source dashboard that you like it might have a provider for micrometer. Otherwise you could easily add one. Are you running the application on prem or in some cloud provider?

[Ben]

Grafana is pretty decent for an open source one

[Marcin Wisniowski]

I'm running it in Docker on a cloud server. Grafana indeed looks good, I wasn't aware it could work with Micrometer. Although it makes sense in retrospect.

[Anders Sveen]

If you don't mind paying a little bit we use MicroMeter to send the stats to New Relic. Of course New Relic is awesome so I would pay for that anyway. Then the Insights part lets you graph stuff pretty easily.

Hosted Graphite is also an option that is not super expensive (includes Grafana).

[Matteo Mirk]

I work for Expedia Group, we use Grafana constantly in production to monitor our systems, it works very well. Here are some concepts that can help you decide:
• Micrometer is just a facade for metric reporting libs, think of it as an equivalent of slf4j for metrics
• there are various metrics protocols (graphite, prometheus, etc), so client-side you’ll use a Micrometer connector which will provide the implementation
• on the other side there are various metric collectors that will store the time-series in appropriate data stores (InfluxDB, for example) that understand those protocols, so you want to use the one that understands your format of choice
• Grafana is just a graphic front-end for such data stores, it supports various formats

[Marcin Wisniowski]

I'll try out Grafana + Micrometer, New Relic looks great, but in this case it's just a hobby project with no profits, so I want to avoid costs other than the actual server. Thanks for the suggestions everyone.

[Marcin Wisniowski]

I used Micrometer --> Graphite --> Grafana. Works great. 🙂