The Spring Cloud Data Flow server is a Spring Boot application that includes the Actuator library which adds several production ready features to help you monitor and manage your application.

The Actuator library adds http endpoints under the context path /management that is also a discovery page for available endpoints. For example, there is a health endpoint that shows application health information and an env that lists properties from Spring’s ConfigurableEnvironment. By default only the health and application info endpoints are accessible. The other endpoints are considered to be sensitive and need to be enabled explicitly via configuration. If you are enabling sensitive endpoints then you should also secure the Data Flow server’s endpoints so that information is not inadvertantly exposed to unauthenticated users. The local Data Flow server has security disabled by default, so all actuator endpoints are available.

The Data Flow server requires the a relational database and if the feature toggled for analytics is enabled, a Redis server is also required. The Data Flow server will autoconfigure the DataSourceHealthIndicator and RedisHealthIndicator if needed. The health of these two services is incorporated to the overall health status of the server through the health endpoint.

18.1 Spring Boot Admin

A nice way to visualize and interact with actuator endpoints is to incorporate the Spring Boot Admin client library into the Spring Cloud Data Flow server. You can create the Spring Boot Admin application by following a few simple steps.

An easy way to include the client library into the Data Flow server is to create a new Data Flow Server project from start.spring.io. Type 'flow' in the "Search for dependencies" text box and select the server runtime you want to customize. A simple way to have the Spring Cloud Data Flow server be a client to the Spring Boot Admin Server is by adding a dependency to the Data Flow server’s pom and an additional configuration property as documented in Registering Client Applications.

This will result in a UI with a tabs for each of the actuator endpoints.

Figure 18.1. Spring Boot Admin UI

Additional configuration is required to interact with JMX beans and logging levels. Refer to the Spring Boot admin documentation for more information. As only the info and health endpoints are available to unauthenticated users, you should enable security on the Data Flow Server and also configure Spring Boot Admin server’s security so that it can securely access the actuator endpoints.