How to Seamlessly Integrate Arthas into Spring Boot for Real‑Time Monitoring

Introduction

Arthas is an online monitoring and diagnosis tool that provides real‑time visibility into application load, memory, GC, thread status, method arguments, execution time, class loading, and more, without modifying the application code.

1. Spring Boot Integration

Include the official arthas-spring-boot-starter dependency in your pom.xml:

<dependency>
  <groupId>com.taobao.arthas</groupId>
  <artifactId>arthas-spring-boot-starter</artifactId>
  <version>4.1.3</version>
</dependency>

Configure Arthas properties in application.yml (or application.properties) to expose a telnet port and an HTTP port for the web console:

arthas:
  telnet-port: 3658   # telnet access
  http-port: 8563      # web console access

When the Spring Boot application starts, the starter automatically launches the Arthas agent and attaches it to the same JVM process.

2. Using Arthas

2.1 Telnet Console

Connect to the Arthas terminal via telnet: telnet localhost 3658 After connecting, you can run any Arthas command, such as dashboard, to inspect runtime metrics.

2.2 Web Console

Open a browser and navigate to http://localhost:8563 (or the configured HTTP port) to access the Arthas Web Console.

The integrated approach eliminates the need to download the Arthas binary or copy it into the container.

3. Arthas Tunnel Enhancement

In micro‑service environments, each Spring Boot instance may run its own Arthas client, making management cumbersome. Arthas Tunnel acts as a registration center for multiple agents.

3.1 Tunnel Server

Download the server from the official GitHub releases and start it with detail pages enabled:

java -jar -Darthas.enable-detail-pages=true arthas-tunnel-server-4.1.3-fatjar.jar

Optional parameters: -Dserver.port=8081 – web port of the server -Darthas.server.port=8888 – registration port for agents

Access the management UI at http://127.0.0.1:8080/actuator/arthas. **Warning:** the UI has no built‑in security; do not expose it publicly without additional safeguards.

3.2 Tunnel Client

Configure each Spring Boot application to register with the Tunnel Server. Disable direct telnet/HTTP ports by setting them to -1 and provide the server address:

spring:
  application:
    name: springboot-11-arthas
arthas:
  telnet-port: -1
  http-port: -1
  ip: 0.0.0.0
  app-name: ${spring.application.name}
  agent-id: ${spring.application.name}_Don001
  tunnel-server: ws://127.0.0.1:7777/ws

After the agents register, the Tunnel Server UI lists all connected instances, allowing you to select and interact with any of them.

3.3 Authentication

Define credentials in the configuration:

arthas:
  username: admin
  password: admin

In the Arthas terminal, authenticate first: auth -username admin admin Only after successful authentication can you execute other commands, such as session to view connection details.

4. Summary

The article demonstrates three key steps: (1) integrating the Arthas Spring Boot Starter for effortless in‑process monitoring, (2) using Telnet or the Web Console to interact with Arthas, and (3) leveraging Arthas Tunnel Server/Client to centrally manage and debug multiple Java services across servers, while emphasizing the security risks of exposing the management UI.

For the full source code, see the repository:

https://gitee.com/Don212/learning/tree/master/springboot-11-arthas

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