You can monitor HikariCP metrics in several ways, depending on your tech stack:
🔹 1. Built-in JMX Support
HikariCP exposes key metrics through JMX, which you can consume with tools like JConsole, VisualVM, or monitoring solutions that support JMX (e.g., Prometheus JMX Exporter).
Key JMX metrics include:
- Active connections
- Idle connections
- Total connections
- Pending threads waiting for a connection
🔹 2. Spring Boot Actuator (Recommended in Spring Apps)
If you use Spring Boot, adding spring-boot-starter-actuator automatically exposes HikariCP metrics under the /actuator/metrics endpoint, e.g.:
/actuator/metrics/hikaricp.connections.active
/actuator/metrics/hikaricp.connections.idle
/actuator/metrics/hikaricp.connections.pending
🔹 3. Micrometer Integration
Spring Boot Actuator uses Micrometer, which can export metrics to backends like Prometheus, Datadog, New Relic, etc. By configuring Micrometer in your app, you can integrate HikariCP metrics into your observability stack for dashboards and alerts.
🔹 4. Logs & Leak Detection
HikariCP logs connection acquisition and usage issues (e.g., when leak detection triggers) — ensure your logging system (e.g., ELK, Grafana Loki) captures and indexes these logs for analysis.
🔹 5. Third-party APM tools
Application Performance Monitoring tools like New Relic, Dynatrace, or AppDynamics often provide JDBC pool metrics out of the box, including for HikariCP, along with insights into slow queries.
✅ Summary:
In production, a combination of Spring Boot Actuator + Micrometer + Prometheus/Grafana is a best practice setup to monitor HikariCP usage and diagnose connection pool problems.