3.8. Status and Metrics

Note

Added in EHRbase version 0.15.0

Warning

The status and metrics endpoints can contain critical and sensitive information on the running ehrbase instance that could serve possible attackers to identify vulnerabilities. Please ensure to use a solid security config on the EHRbase server or disable the metrics and status endpoints in production environments with sensitive data.

This section covers the status and metric endpoints provided by Spring-Boot-Actuator to provide additional information on the running EHRbase server including metrics on the usage of the API since last boot.

The Status and Metric endpoints provide additional information which is useful in environments that use a bunch of microservices that rely on each other as in cloud orchestration like Kubernets. The status endpoint can support the management of these complex systems by providing liveness and readiness endpoints which allow orchestration tools to check whether the EHBase service is running and if it capable of serving incoming requests.

Additional metrics allow to identify bottlenecks in connections between services as between EHRbase service and a connected database server if the connection metric shows very long durations for communications or if the connection pool limit is exhausted. Another possible use case could be detection of attacks against the EHRbase service due to a high occurrence of authorization client errors. As you see there are many things you can do with these endpoints.

The Status and Metrics API interface is available at the “/management” resource which will be appended to the base URL of the ehrbase instance. E.g. if EHRbase is running at “https://api.ehrbase.org” the status API and all sub endpoints are available at “https://api.ehrbase.org/ehrbase/management”.