Explore Streamlined Development: ELK Stack for Spring Boot Microservices

Microservices architectures, while offering agility, scalability, and modularity, can introduce challenges when it comes to troubleshooting and monitoring. With logs distributed across various services, obtaining a holistic view of your applications becomes difficult. The Spring Boot Microservices ELK Stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana) provides a potent solution to streamline log management within a microservices environment. Let’s briefly introduce these components:

• Elasticsearch: A distributed, highly scalable search and analytics engine. It acts as the central log storage and indexing system within the ELK Stack.
• Logstash: A flexible data collection and processing pipeline. It gathers logs from various sources (like your Spring Boot microservices), transforms them if needed, and sends them to Elasticsearch.
• Kibana: A powerful visualization interface. It connects to Elasticsearch, enabling you to query your logs, create real-time dashboards, and gain insights from your application data.

In this blog, we’ll guide you through integrating the ELK Stack with your Spring Boot microservices.

Benefits of Centralized Logging with ELK

• Unified Log Storage: The ELK Stack consolidates logs from all your Spring Boot Microservices into a single, searchable Elasticsearch repository.
• Powerful Search and Analysis: Elasticsearch’s extensive querying capabilities enable you to rapidly pinpoint issues, extract insights from logs, and analyze patterns.
• Real-time Monitoring: Kibana’s customizable dashboards and visualizations provide real-time monitoring of system health, performance, and potential problems.
• Enhanced Troubleshooting: The ELK Stack empowers you to quickly identify errors, trace requests across services, and analyze trends, thus facilitating troubleshooting.

Prerequisites

• Basic understanding of Spring Boot and microservices architectures
• Familiarity with the core concepts of the ELK Stack
• An AWS account with a running EC2 instance

Step-by-Step Guide

1. Setting up the ELK Stack on AWS

🔸 Installing Elasticsearch

Add the Elastic Signing Key:

wget -qO - https://artifacts.elastic.co/GPG-KEY-elasticsearch | sudo apt-key add -

Add the Repository Definition:

echo "deb https://artifacts.elastic.co/packages/7.x/apt stable main" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list.d/elastic-7.x.list

Update and Install Elasticsearch:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install elasticsearch

Start Elasticsearch Service:

sudo systemctl start elasticsearch.service

(Optional) Enable Elasticsearch on Startup:

sudo systemctl enable elasticsearch.service

🔸 Installing Logstash

Follow steps 1 and 2 from Elasticsearch installation (adding key/repo).

Update and Install Logstash:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install logstash

Start Logstash Service:

sudo systemctl start logstash.service

(Optional) Enable Logstash on Startup:

sudo systemctl enable logstash.service

🔸 Installing Kibana

Follow steps 1 and 2 from Elasticsearch installation (adding key/repo).

Update and Install Kibana:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install kibana

Start Kibana Service:

sudo systemctl start kibana.service

(Optional) Enable Kibana on Startup:

sudo systemctl enable kibana.service

2. Preparing Your Spring Boot Microservices

Add Dependencies: Include the following in your microservices’ pom.xml or build.gradle:

<dependency>
<groupId>net.logstash.logback</groupId>
<artifactId>logstash-logback-encoder</artifactId>
<version>7.2</version> 
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
<artifactId>spring-boot-starter-logging</artifactId>
</dependency>

Configure Logback: Create a logback-spring.xml file in your src/main/resources directory:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<configuration>
<appender name="LOGSTASH" class="net.logstash.logback.appender.LogstashTcpSocketAppender">
<destination>logstash-server-hostname:5000</destination> 
<encoder class="net.logstash.logback.encoder.LogstashEncoder" /> 
</appender>

<root level="INFO">
<appender-ref ref="LOGSTASH" />
</root>
</configuration>

Replace logstash-server-hostname with your EC2 instance’s hostname or IP.