Monitoring flowable deployment using Promethues stack

Question

The goal is to monitor the flowable project deployed on Kubernetes using Prometheus/Grafana

Install kube-prometheus-stack using helm charts:

helm repo add prometheus-community https://prometheus-community.github.io/helm-charts
helm repo update
helm install prometheus prometheus-community/kube-prometheus-stack

Its successfully deployed and we are able to start monitoring the other resources inside our Kubernetes cluster using Prometheus/Grafana

Next, Flowable is running as a pod, which I want to get the flowable pod metrics onto Prometheus and come up the dasboard.

Any suggestions on how to achieve the monitoring for a flowable application running as a pod inside kubernetes

Answer 1

You can check out the Flowable documentation on Monitoring. There are a lot of useful metrics listed that you can add to your monitoring.

To enable Prometheus exporting on Flowable, you need to set the following Spring property:

management.metrics.export.prometheus.enabled=true

Answer 2

Flowable (as a Spring Boot application) uses Micrometer that will provide metrics in prometheus format as soon as you add the micrometer-registry-prometheus dependency. Endpoint is then actuator/prometheus.

Creating your own prometheus metric is actually not that difficult. You can create a bean implementing FlowableEventListener and MetricBinderand then listen to the FlowableEngineEventType PROCESS_COMPLETED to increase a micrometer Counter every time a process gets completed.

Register your counter to the MeterRegistry in the bindTo() method and the metric should be available over the prometheus endpoint. No need for a dedicated exporter pod.