Measuring time between 2 points of various microservices

Question

Example:
We have 2 microservices (A, B) and queue (Q).

A receives request from client, process this request and sends message to Q
B receives message from Q process this message and saving some stuff to database.

I want to measure time between these points (including time when message is waiting on queue):

• application A is starting to process request
• application B is ending processing message

There are any ready solution for collecting that metrics? (It would be nice if it was easily integrative with spring-boot)

Answer 1

The easy/fast way: just log the events you are interested in, and make the time difference.

The professional/right way: integrate a metric system with your spring-boot application. This requires some effort, but the benefits are much bigger.

Here are the steps:

• Document about Prometheus, Micrometer, Grafana
• Follow this step-by-step guide which shows you how to integrate those components and add your own custom metric
• Add your own metrics and create dashboards (in other words, build your observability setup, because you already got all the components in place)