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Time series metrics reporting and alerting and an essential tool when it comes to monitoring production services. Graphs help you monitor trends over time, identify spikes in load / latency, identify bottlenecks with constrained resources, etc. [Dropwizard Metrics](https://metrics.dropwizard.io/4.0.0/) is a great library for collecting metrics and has a lot offeature out of the box including various [JVM metrics](/posts/monitoring-your-jvm-with-dropwizard-metrics). There are also many third party library hooks for collections metrics on HikariCP connections pools, Redis client connections, HTTP client connections, and many more.

Time series metrics reporting and alerting and an essential tool when it comes to monitoring production services. Graphs help you monitor trends over time, identify spikes in load / latency, identify bottlenecks with constrained resources, etc. [Dropwizard Metrics](https://metrics.dropwizard.io/4.0.0/) is a great library for collecting metrics and has a lot offeatures out of the box including various [JVM metrics](/posts/monitoring-your-jvm-with-dropwizard-metrics). There are also many third party library hooks for collections metrics on HikariCP connections pools, Redis client connections, HTTP client connections, and many more.

Once metrics are being collected we need a time series datastore as well as a graphing and alerting system to get the most out of our metrics. This exmaple will be utilizing [Grafana Cloud](https://grafana.com/cloud) which offers cloud hosted [Grafana](https://grafana.com/) a graphing and alerting application that hooks into many datasources, as well as two options for time series datasources [Graphite](https://graphiteapp.org/) and [Prometheus](https://prometheus.io/). [StubbornJava](https://www.stubbornjava.com) has public facing Grafana dashboards that will continue to add new metrics as new content is added. Take a look at the [StubbornJava Overview](https://stubbornjava.grafana.net/d/sYu06dviz/stubbornjava-overview?orgId=1) dashboard to start with.

## DropwizardMetrics Reporter

Once we have our custom `GraphiteSender` implemented all we are left to do is plug it into the existing `GraphiteReporter` and start it. We have our keys partitioned by environment and host so that all metrics are easier to split up and view aggregates or host by host metrics.

Once we have our custom `GraphiteSender` implemented all we are left to do is plug it into the existing `GraphiteReporter` and start it. We have our keys partitioned by environment and host so that all metrics are easier to split up and view aggregates or host by host metrics.See it in action at [StubbornJava Overview](https://stubbornjava.grafana.net/d/sYu06dviz/stubbornjava-overview?orgId=1).