Chaos Monkey for Spring Boot
Chaos Monkey for Spring Boot is a free, open-source project for teams examining how Spring Boot applications behave during operational disruption.
What Chaos Monkey for Spring Boot is
Chaos Monkey for Spring Boot is a free, open-source project for teams examining how Spring Boot applications behave during operational disruption. It can add request latency, throw configured exceptions, terminate applications, and apply CPU or memory pressure. Watchers can target annotated Spring beans, health indicators, RestTemplate or WebClient beans, and configured beans by name or class. The project can be added as a dependency or loaded externally when an application starts. With Spring Boot Actuator included, HTTP and JMX endpoints can change configuration at runtime. Documentation describes Unleash feature-toggle control, springdoc-openapi display in Swagger UI, and Micrometer-based monitoring integrations. It is self-hosted, supports network fault injection, experiment scheduling, and blast-radius controls, but not cloud fault injection. Each version matches a specific Spring Boot version; an external JAR built for another version may break the application.
Good
- Free and open source
- Multiple latency, exception, and runtime assaults
- Configurable watchers and targets
- Actuator HTTP and JMX controls
- Supports scheduling and blast-radius controls
Watch out
- No cloud fault injection
- Version compatibility is specific to Spring Boot
- External JAR mismatch may break applications
- Self-hosted deployment required
Who it suits
This project suits teams testing resilience and operational behavior in Spring Boot applications. It is aimed at users comfortable with self-hosted dependencies, Actuator controls, and planned experiments.
Verdict
Chaos Monkey for Spring Boot provides configurable disruption experiments inside Spring Boot environments. Teams should match versions carefully and follow the project’s guidance to begin with noncritical services outside production.
The facts
Each one read from Chaos Monkey for Spring Boot's own pages, with the date it was checked.
What it does
- Activation
- You can add it as a project dependency or load it as an external dependency when starting a Spring Boot application.checked 7 Oct 2001
- Attack types
- Documented assaults include latency, exceptions, application termination, memory, and CPU load.checked 7 Oct 2001
- Compatibility limit
- Each Chaos Monkey release is built for a specific Spring Boot version, and using the external JAR with a different version may break the application.checked 8 Oct 2001
- Configuration
- Configuration can be changed at runtime through Spring Boot Actuator HTTP or JMX endpoints; Actuator must be included in the project dependencies for this feature.checked 8 Oct 2001
- Feature flags
- The project supports feature toggles and includes minimal configuration for using Unleash to control them.checked 8 Oct 2001
- Integration
- Add it as a project dependency or load it as an external dependency when starting a Spring Boot app.checked 8 Oct 2001
- Integrations
- The documentation describes using Unleash to control feature toggles and springdoc-openapi to show Chaos Monkey endpoints in Swagger UI.checked 7 Oct 2001
- Intended users
- The project is focused on Spring Boot applications and aims to help test application behavior such as fallbacks, network latency, and service failures.checked 8 Oct 2001
- Monitoring integrations
- Through Spring Boot’s Micrometer-backed metrics facade, the guide lists monitoring systems including Datadog, Prometheus, New Relic, Graphite, and Influx.checked 8 Oct 2001
- Open source
- The project is open source and welcomes contributions.checked 8 Oct 2001
- Operational guidance
- The project recommends checking service resilience and monitoring, defining steady states, and starting experiments on a noncritical service outside production.checked 8 Oct 2001
- Purpose
- Chaos Monkey for Spring Boot tests Spring Boot applications by injecting failures during operation.checked 8 Oct 2001
- Request attacks
- Request assaults can add latency or throw configured runtime exceptions when watched methods are called.checked 8 Oct 2001
- Runtime attacks
- Runtime assaults can target the application’s CPU, memory, or availability through the AppKiller assault.checked 8 Oct 2001
- Runtime controls
- Spring Boot Actuator HTTP and JMX endpoints can expose controls for changing configuration at runtime.checked 7 Oct 2001
- Security and compliance
- The repository identifies its license as Apache-2.0; the project pages opened do not state a product security certification or compliance claim.checked 8 Oct 2001
- Security guidance
- The project advises checking resilience and monitoring, defining steady states, starting with a noncritical service, and gaining experience outside production before running experiments in production.checked 7 Oct 2001
- Support
- The project directs bug reports and feature requests to GitHub Issues and general usage questions to Stack Overflow with the spring-boot-chaos-monkey tag.checked 8 Oct 2001
- Targets
- Watchers can target annotated classes, Actuator components, and outgoing requests.checked 7 Oct 2001
- Watchers
- Watchers can target annotated Spring beans, Spring Boot health indicators, RestTemplate and WebClient beans, or configured beans by name or class.checked 8 Oct 2001
The company
- Founded
- 2004checked 28 Sep 2001
- Headquarters
- Solingen, Germanychecked 28 Sep 2001
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