Observability

When applications are observable, operations teams can identify and understand the root causes of bugs, bottlenecks, and other inefficiencies. Open Liberty provides a robust framework for developing observable applications and integrates with numerous third-party monitoring tools.

The following topics provide information to help you develop observable applications with Open Liberty.

Microservice observability with metrics

Open Liberty uses MicroProfile Metrics to provide metrics that describe the internal state of many Open Liberty components. MicroProfile Metrics provides a /metrics endpoint from which you can access all metrics that are emitted by an Open Liberty server and deployed applications.

Choose your own monitoring tools with MicroProfile Metrics

The Open Liberty MicroProfile Metrics 5.0 feature uses embedded Micrometer metrics technology to transfer metric data to multiple third-party monitoring systems. Starting in MicroProfile Metrics 5.0, you can instrument your code in a standardized way to visualize metrics results in the monitoring system of your choice.

Health checks for microservices

A health check is a special REST API implementation that you can use to validate the status of a microservice and its dependencies. With MicroProfile Health, microservices can self-check their health and publish their overall status to a defined endpoint.

Enable distributed tracing with MicroProfile Telemetry

In microservice applications, sources of latency or inaccuracy can be difficult to determine because relationships and dependencies among the constituent services are not always obvious. MicroProfile Telemetry helps you collect data on the paths that application requests take through services.

For hands-on tutorials on different observability configurations for Open Liberty, check out our Observability guides.