Earlier in this chapter, we learned about the monitoring capabilities that are provided by Spring Boot. We saw examples of writing custom HealthIndicators implementations, creating Metrics, and using GaugeService and CounterService to emit data. The simple Spring Boot Admin Web framework gave us some nice graphical UI to visualize the data, but all of these metrics were in-the-moment, with no long-term retention and historical access. Not being able to observe the trends, detect the deviations from the baseline, and compare today with last week is not a very good strategy, especially for an enterprise complex system. We all want to be able to have access to the time series data going weeks, if not months, back and set up alarms and thresholds, if something goes unplanned.

This recipe will introduce us to an amazing time series graphical tool: Graphite. Graphite is a two-part system. It provides storage for numeric time series data as well...