JHipster also provides a console application based on the Elastic Stack (often referred to as ELK), which can be used for logs and metrics monitoring of the application. JHipster Console is another open source application. It is really useful and provides some nice dashboards that can be used to visualize the application. As with other JHipster products, it is much easier to get started with the JHipster Console. 

Our applications stream the metrics and logs into the JHipster console. To make that happen, there are a few settings in the application-prod.yml file in all the applications (gateway and microservices applications):

  metrics:
    logs: # Reports metrics in the logs
      enabled: false
      report-frequency: 60 # in seconds
  logging:
    use-json-format: false # By default, logs are not in Json format
    logstash: # Forward logs to logstash over a socket, used by 
      LoggingConfiguration
      enabled: false
      host: localhost
      port: 5000
      queue-size: 512

...
jhipster:
  security:
    authentication:
      jwt:
        base64-secret: ...
  logging:
    logstash: # forward logs to ELK
      enabled: true
      host: jhipster-logstash
  metrics:
    logs: # report metrics in the logs
      enabled: true
      report-frequency: 60 # in seconds
spring:
  zipkin:
    base-url: http://jhipster-zipkin:9411
    enabled: true
  sleuth:
    sampler:
      probability: 1 # report 100% of traces to Zipkin
eureka:
  client:
    service-url:
      defaultZone: http://admin:${jhipster.registry.password}@
        jhipster-registry:8761/eureka/

Let's look at the JHipster Console running on http://localhost:5601.

The JHipster Console provides the following (customizable) dashboards in Kibana:

It also provides preconfigured dashboards for logs, application-level metrics such as JVM threads metrics, and other details:

Added to this, the console also has an interface where we can see the application logs. It shows the log of all the applications we've deployed. We can filter and search the logs with respect to the application:

Since we chose Zipkin integration, the Zipkin server is also configured and the trace details can be viewed in its UI, which is provided as part of the JHipster Console and integrates with the Kibana dashboard, at http://127.0.0.1:9411/, or from the trace data that was integrated into the Kibana dashboard in the JHipster Console:

Zipkin tracing is disabled by default. To enable Zipkin tracing, we need to include the zipkin profile when we build our images and need to set the spring.zipkin.enabled property to true in the application configurations. The configuration is enabled when running the preceding Docker Compose setup, but the images still need to be built with the zipkin Gradle profile. This will trigger span reporting to the Zipkin server and also add correlation IDs (traceID, spanID, and parentID) to request headers and logs.

You can learn more about the JHipster Console by visiting https://www.jhipster.tech/monitoring/#jhipster-console.