Archived project. No maintenance.

Since I do not use the play framework myself anymore I have decided to stop my work on this project. You can find an active fork of this project here https://github.com/Jyllands-Posten/play-prometheus-filters.

Play prometheus filters

This play library provides four types of filters that collect prometheus metrics.

Two of these filters are also compatible with the lagom framework.

A simple hello world application using these filters can be found in the following repo: https://github.com/stijndehaes/play-prometheus-filters-example-app

To use the library add the following to you build.sbt:

libraryDependencies += "com.github.stijndehaes" %% "play-prometheus-filters" % "0.5.0"

This latest version supports play 2.7. For more info on play version compatibility see the releases matrix.

Releases

Release	Play version
0.1.x	2.5.x
0.2.x	2.5.x
0.3.x	2.6.x
0.4.x	2.6.x
0.5.x	2.7.x

The filters

Request counter

This filter counts all the requests in your application and adds a label for the status. This filter is compatible with the lagom framework.

Latency filter

This filter collects the latency of all requests. This filter is compatible with the lagom framework.

Route Latency Filter

This filter collects the latency for all requests and adds a label called RouteActionMethod. This action method is the method name of the method you provided your routes file. This filter makes it possible to measure the latency for all your routes. This filter is not compatible with the lagom framework, since it does not provide the RouteActionMethod.

Status and Route Latency Filter

This filter collects the latency for all requests, adds the following labels:

• RouteActionMethod - Function method name in the controller for the request
• Status - Response code of request
• Controller - Controller that serviced the request
• Path - Path of request
• Verb - Verb of request (GET, PUT, etc.) This filter makes it possible to measure the latency for all your routes and the status of the response for this route. It thus combines all the above filters into one. This filter is not compatible with the lagom framework, since it does not provide the RouteActionMethod.

Status and Route Counter Filter

This filter collects the counts of all requests, adds the following labels:

• method - Function method name in the controller for the request
• status - Response code of request
• controller - Controller that serviced the request
• path - Path of request
• verb - Verb of request (GET, PUT, etc.) This filter makes it possible to measure the counts for all your routes and the status of the response for this route. It thus combines all the above filters into one. This filter is not compatible with the lagom framework, since it does not provide the RouteActionMethod.

Status and Route Latency and Counter Filter

Combines the StatusAndRoute Latency and Count filters.

Example:

GET         /metrics          play.prometheus.controllers.PrometheusController.getMetrics

The RouteActionMethod for the above example would be getMetrics

How to enable the filters

See the documentation of play

You should make a filters class:

import javax.inject.Inject
import play.api.http.DefaultHttpFilters
import com.github.stijndehaes.playprometheusfilters.filters.LatencyFilter
import com.github.stijndehaes.playprometheusfilters.filters.StatusCounterFilter

class MyFilters @Inject() (
  latencyFilter: LatencyFilter,
  statusCounterFilter: StatusCounterFilter
) extends DefaultHttpFilters(latencyFilter, statusCounterFilter)

And the enable this filter in the application.conf

play.http.filters=com.example.MyFilters

Customizing metrics or building your own filters

The setup of a filter is very simple: extend the MetricFilter class and define a metrics property with a list of metrics you want your filter to use.

E.g. the LatencyFilter looks like this:

@Singleton
class LatencyFilter @Inject()(registry: CollectorRegistry, configuration: Configuration)(implicit mat: Materializer, ec: ExecutionContext) extends MetricsFilter(configuration) {

  override val metrics = List(
    LatencyOnlyRequestMetricsBuilder.build(registry, DefaultUnmatchedDefaults)
  )
}

The @Singleton annotation ensures the application creates only a single instance of it. Via the @Inject annotation, Play will automatically pass available instances into the contructor (using Guice DI). The CollectorRegistry is needed to register a metric. The Configuration may contain information about paths to exclude for metrics. This is handled by the MetricsFilter class.

You can customize a filter in different ways

• Define one or more metrics in the metrics list (other than in the filters already provided). See CounterRequestMetrics and LatencyRequestMetrics for provided metric types.

• You can define you own metric. E.g. currently only Counter and Histogram (Latency) metrics are provided. If you'd like to use Prometheus's Summary or Gauge metric, you can implement your own metric by creating a RequestMetric implementation and a corresponding RequestMetricBuilder.
  See CounterRequestMetrics and LatencyRequestMetrics for how to implement your own builder and metric.
  The builder, builds sets up the metrics instance with a name, help, labels, etc and registers the metric. Then it returns a RequestMetric instance which uses the metric. Implement the mark function to pass labels to the metric using data from either the request or response, then call the 'metric'-function like observe or inc to apply the metrics.

• Customize the handling of defaults in case a certain label cannot be found. This can be done by providing a custom UnmachedDefaults implementation. The default implementation always returns a fixed string like unmatchedPath if the path property cannot be determined.

  E.g. a custom implementation could use the 'uri' property from the request, which is always available, instead of just a fixed string. Using this on a Counter metric would give you insight into which non-existing urls are being used. A country creates a single metric bucket per unique uri.
  You probably would not want to use dynamic default properties on a Latency or Summary metric since that would give many metric buckets per unique url`

  case object DynamicUnmatchedDefaults extends UnmatchedDefaults {
    val unmatchedPath: RequestHeader => String = _.uri
  }

Excluding paths from metrics

A path can be excluded from metrics by adding it to the play-prometheus-filters.exclude.paths property in the application.conf. E.g. when using the PrometheusController you might want to exclude the path on which you configured the controller in the routes file.

By default, the /metrics is excluded.

play-prometheus-filters {
  # exclude /metrics endpoint assuming PrometheusController is routed to this uri
  exclude.paths = ["/metrics"]
}

Prometheus controller

The project also provides a prometheus controller with a get metric method. If you add the following to your routes file:

GET         /metrics          com.github.stijndehaes.playprometheusfilters.controllers.PrometheusController.getMetrics

You should be able to immediately get the metrics

Default Hotspot metrics

The Prometheus Hotspot library provides some default collectors for garbage collection, memory pool, etc. Default these collectors are not registered. This can be changed by setting the configuration property to true.

play-prometheus-filters.register-default-hotspot-collectors = true