Grails plugin to check and monitor application status with a dashboard UI

grails-appinfo plugin download:

grails-appinfo-ui plugin download:

Grails-appinfo Grails plugin is a set of convenient utilities for application system details, health-check, configuration and monitoring at runtime.

This Grails plugin builds on top of spring boot actuator API with Grails specific enhancements on stock actuator endpoints.

To consume actuator JSON endpoints, the testing Grails application also provides a monitoring dashboard inspired by grails-actuator-ui.

The dashboard UI is built on bootstrap with CSS framework from AdminLTE.

This repository contains three software modules:

• grails-appinfo Grails plugin that provides RESTful JSON Actuator endpoints
• grails-appinfo-ui Grails plugin that provides on top of grails-appinfo RESTful endpoint a web UI dashboard based on AdminLTE theme framework
• test-grails-appinfo a testing host Grails application.

The grails-appinfo-ui plugin includes a AdminLTE (Bootstrap styled) dashboards that make ajax calls to RESTful endpoints that grails-appinfo enhances on stock Spring Boot Actuator endpoints.

The dashboard's url is <root-context>/appinfoDashboard. It contains following components:

UI dynamic (Grails GSP) components:

• gsp in folder views/appinfoDashboard
• layout template views/layouts/appinfo.gsp
• taglib taglib/grails/plugin/appinfo/AvatarTaglib.groovy

UI static resources (from AdminLTE distribution):

• grails-app/assets/images/appinfo
• grails-app/assets/javascripts/appinfo
• grails-app/assets/stylesheets/appinfo

In host Grails application's build.gradle file:

plugins {
    compile ':grails-appinfo:$version'
}

or load the UI dashboard

plugins {
    compile ':grails-appinfo-ui:$version'
}

Hosting Grails application version 3.3.0+.

In host Grails application grails-app/conf/application.yml

# Appinfo grails plugin settings
appinfo:
    health:
        mongodb:
            # hide or show password in the mongodb connection url if it contains credential info
            # if set to false (default if not set), the password will be replaced as '<pswd>'
            showPassword: false  # default to false
        urls:   # list of webservice endpoints to check
            - url: 'http://localhost:8080'
              name: 'web root'   # name of the endpoint
              method: 'GET'      # http method, default to 'HEAD' if not given
            - url: 'http://localhost:8080/info'
              name: 'web_info'
        aws:
            s3:
                # either:
                bucket: 'bucket-name'  # bucket name used in s3 health check
                # or: (for multiple buckets)
                #buckets:
                #    - 'bucket-name'
                #    - 'another-bucket-name'
    info:
        # add 'grails-system-info' to Actuator info endpoint, default (if not set) is not enabled
        system: true
        # add 'grails-logging-info' to Actuator info endpoint, default (if not set) is not enabled
        logging: true
        # add following keys to Actuator info endpoint, default (if not set) is not enabled
        # - 'jvm-version'
        # - 'groovy-version'
        # - 'grails-runtime-environment'
        # - 'grails-reload-enabled'
        # - 'grails-runtime-threads-info'
        runtime: true

The plugin provides RESTful json view by itself with endpoints as below: <root-context>/ followed by autoconfig, configprops, dump, env, health, info, metrics, mappings, shutdown, trace, beans.

Most of them are decorators of Spring Boot Actuator native endpoints. But with enhanced information and connectivity support such as mongodb, s3, generic web url endpoint, etc.

For example, localhost:8080/health endpoint returns:

{
    "status": "DOWN",
    "diskSpace": {
        "status": "UP",
        "total": 499963170816,
        "free": 281595985920,
        "threshold": 262144000
    },
    "urlHealthCheck_web_info": {
        "status": "UP",
        "url": "http://localhost:8080/info",
        "method": "HEAD",
        "timeout.threshold": "10000 ms"
    },
    "databaseHealthCheck": {
        "status": "UP",
        "database": "H2",
        "hello": 1
    },
    "urlHealthCheck_webroot": {
        "status": "UP",
        "url": "http://localhost:8080",
        "method": "GET",
        "timeout.threshold": "10000 ms"
    },
    "mongodbHealthCheck": {
        "status": "DOWN",
        "url": "mongodb://localhost/test_grails_appinfo",
        "db": "test_grails_appinfo",
        "error": "java.lang.Exception: MongoDB check timed out after 3000 ms"
    },
    "s3HealthCheck": {
        "status": "DOWN",
        "endpoint": "https://s3.amazonaws.com",
        "error": "java.lang.Exception: S3 check fail: Unable to load AWS credentials from any provider in the chain"
    }
}

Some dashboard UI screenshots:

• dashboard
• URL mappings
• http call trace
• runtime beans

• scale back appinfo plugin to non-web profiled plugin, to keep it lean as RESTful only
• add appinfo-ui plugin for web UI dashboard support based on AdminLTE theme framework

• fix mongodb connection checking logic
• enhance mongodb connection check with timeout window support, when timeout is reached, the connection will throw exception

• support Grails 3.3.x with Spring Boot 1.5.x and GORM 6.1.x

Bin Le ([email protected])

Apache License Version 2.0. (http://www.apache.org/licenses/)