Microservices with Spring Boot —

Circuit Breaker & Log Tracing (Part 4)

Handle Failures and Trace Requests

OMAR ELGABRY Follow

Jun 11, 2018 · 3 min read

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 Handle Failures and Trace Requests

🙌 The Github repository for the application:

https://github.com/OmarElGabry/microservices-spring-boot

. . .

Hystrix
If you have, let’s say 3 services, A calls → B, and B calls → C service. What if,
a failure happened at B? The error will cascade down to service C, right?.

A -> B (failure) -> C

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 Another example, lets say a service A calls a remote service R, and for some
reason the remote service is down. How can we handle such a situation?

What we would like to do is stop failures from cascading down, and provide
a way to self-heal, which improves the system’s overall resiliency.

Hystrix is the implementation of Circuit Breaker pattern, which gives a

control over latency and failure between distributed services.

The main idea is to stop cascading failures by failing fast and recover as
soon as possible — Important aspects of fault-tolerant systems that self-heal.

So, we’ll add Hystrix to gallery service, and we’ll simulate a failure at image
service. In the pom.xml le

<dependency>
<groupId>org.springframework.cloud</groupId>
<artifactId>spring-cloud-starter-netflix-hystrix</artifactId>
</dependency>

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 In the spring boot main class

// ...
@EnableCircuitBreaker // Enable circuit breakers

public class SpringEurekaGalleryApp {

public static void main(String[] args) {
SpringApplication.run(SpringEurekaGalleryApp.class, args);
}
}

Spring looks for any method annotated with the

@HystrixCommand annotation, and wraps that method so that Hystrix can

monitor it.

Hystrix watches for failures in that method, and if failures reached a

threshold (limit), Hystrix opens the circuit so that subsequent calls will
automatically fail. Therefore, and while the circuit is open, Hystrix redirects
calls to the fallback method.

So, In the controller class, update getGallery() , add annotation and

fallback method.
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 1 package com.eureka.gallery.controllers;
2
3 import java.util.List;
4
5 import org.springframework.beans.factory.annotation.Autowired;
6 import org.springframework.core.env.Environment;
7 import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.PathVariable;
8 import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.RequestMapping;
9 import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.RestController;
10 import org.springframework.web.client.RestTemplate;
11
12 import com.eureka.gallery.entities.Gallery;
13 import com.netflix.hystrix.contrib.javanica.annotation.HystrixCommand;
14
15 @RestController
16 @RequestMapping("/")
17 public class HomeController {
18 @Autowired
19 private RestTemplate restTemplate;
20
21 @HystrixCommand(fallbackMethod = "fallback")
22 @RequestMapping("/{id}")
23 public Gallery getGallery(@PathVariable final int id) {
24 // create gallery object
25 Gallery gallery = new Gallery();
26 gallery.setId(id);
27
28 // get list of available images
29 @SuppressWarnings("unchecked") // we'll throw an exception from image
30 List<Object> images = restTemplate.getForObject("http://image-service/im
31 gallery.setImages(images);

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 32
33 return gallery;
34 }
35
36 // a fallback method to be called if failure happened
37 public Gallery fallback(int galleryId, Throwable hystrixCommand) {
38 return new Gallery(galleryId);
39 }
40 }

HomeController.java hosted with ❤ by GitHub view raw

In the controller class of image service, throw an exception in getImages()

throw new Exception("Images can't be fetched");

Now, go to the browser, and hit localhost:8762/gallery/1 . You should get

an empty gallery object (no images).

{
"id": 1,
"images": null
}

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 Sleuth
If you have, let’s say 3 services, A, B and C. We made three di erent
requests.

One request went from A → B, another from A →B →C, and last one went
from B →C.

A -> B
A -> B -> C
B -> C

As the number of microservices grow, tracing requests that propagate from

one microservice to another and gure out how a requests travels through
the application can be quite daunting.

Sleuth makes it possible to trace the requests by adding unique ids to logs.

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 A trace id (1st) is used for tracking across the microservices; represents the
whole journey of a request across all the microservices, while span id (2nd)
is used for tracking within the individual microservice.

To use Sleuth, add dependency to pom.xml …

<dependency>
<groupId>org.springframework.cloud</groupId>
<artifactId>spring-cloud-starter-sleuth</artifactId>
</dependency>

And In controller of gallery (or image) service, use logger to log some info.

import org.slf4j.Logger;
import org.slf4j.LoggerFactory;

// ...
private static final Logger LOGGER =
LoggerFactory.getLogger(HomeController.class);

public Gallery getGallery(@PathVariable final int id) {

LOGGER.info("Creating gallery object ... ");
// ...

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 LOGGER.info("Returning images ... ");
return images;
}
// ...

Now, when you make a request to gallery service, you should see the trace
and span ids in the console logs.

INFO [gallery-service,adcd5217a36fe469,8639d164315daca9,false] ...

. . .

Thank you for reading! If you enjoyed it, please clap

👏 for it.

Microservices Java Software Development Programming Other

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 WRITTEN BY

OMAR ELGABRY Follow

Software Engineer. Going to the moon 🌑. When I die, turn my

blog into a story.

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This is my freedom area. Don't underestimate it. The devil is in

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