Monitoring

Monitoring your SonarQube instance is key to keeping it healthy and having happy users.

As a start, you can use this Web API to get an overview of the health of your SonarQube installation:

• api/system/health

Java process memory

The SonarQube application server consists of three main Java processes:

• Compute Engine
• Elasticsearch
• Web (including embedded web server)

Each of these Java processes has its own memory settings that can be configured in the <SONARQUBE_HOME>/conf/sonar.properties file. The default memory settings that ship with SonarQube are fine for most instances. If you are supporting a large SonarQube instance (more than 100 users or more than 5,000,000 lines of code) or an instance that is part of your continuous integration pipeline, you should monitor the memory and CPU usage of all three key Java processes on your instance, along with overall disk space. Monitoring will allow you to see if any of the processes is running short of resources and take action ahead of resource shortages. There are numerous monitoring tools available, both open-source and commercial, to help you with this task. SonarSource does not recommend or endorse any particular tool.

Memory settings

You may need to increase your memory settings if you see the following symptoms:

• Your monitoring tools show one or more of the SonarQube processes is reaching its memory limit.
• Any of the SonarQube processes crashes and/or generates an out-of-memory error in the sonar.log file.
• A SonarQube background task fails with an out-of-memory error in the background task log.
• The store size of the Issues index of your Elasticsearch instance (visible in the System Info) is greater than or equal to the memory allocated to the Elasticsearch Java process.

You can increase the maximum memory allocated to the appropriate process by increasing the -Xmx memory setting for the corresponding Java process in your <SONARQUBE_HOME>/conf/sonar.properties file:

The -Xmx parameter accepts numbers in both megabytes (e.g. -Xmx2048m) and gigabytes (e.g. -Xmx2G). The metric suffix is case-insensitive.

Exposed JMX MBeans

The SonarQube Server offers visibility about what happens internally through the exposure of JMX MBeans.

In addition to the classical Java MBeans providing information about the ClassLoader, OS, Memory, and Threads you have access to three more MBeans in the SonarQube Server:

• ComputeEngine
• Database
• SonarQube

All these MBeans are read-only. It's not possible to modify or reset their values in real time.

How do I activate JMX?

Local access

There is nothing to activate to view SonarQube MBeans if your tool is running on the same server as the SonarQube Server.

Remote access

Here are examples of configurations to activate remote access to JMX MBeans.

For the WebServer: 

# JMX WEB - 10443/10444
sonar.web.javaAdditionalOpts=-Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote=true -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.ssl=false -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.authenticate=true -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.port=10443 -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.rmi.port=10444 -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.password.file=/opt/sonarsource/sonar/conf/jmxremote.password -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.access.file=/opt/sonarsource/sonar/conf/jmxremote.access

For the ComputeEngine, there is no specific javaAdditionalOpts entry, simply amend sonar.ce.javaOpts.

Example of jmxremote.access:

#
# JMX Access Control file
#
reader readonly
admin  readwrite \
    create javax.management.monitor.*,javax.management.timer.*,com.sun.management.*,com.oracle.jrockit.* \
    unregister

Example of jmxremote.password:

#
# JMX Access Password file
#
reader readerpassword
admin  adminpassword

Note: You should apply chmod 600 or 400 on the file jmxremote.password, for security reasons.

Prometheus monitoring

You can monitor your SonarQube instance using SonarQube's native integration with Prometheus. Through this integration, you can ensure your instance is running properly and know if you need to take action to prevent future issues.

Prometheus monitors your SonarQube instance by collecting metrics from the /api/monitoring/metrics endpoint. Results are returned in OpenMetrics text format. See Prometheus' documentation on Exposition Formats for more information on the OpenMetrics text format.

Monitoring through this endpoint requires authentication. You can access the endpoint following ways:

• Authorization:Bearer xxxx header: You can use a bearer token during a database upgrade and when SonarQube is fully operational. Define the bearer token in the sonar.properties file using the sonar.web.systemPasscode property.
• X-Sonar-Passcode: xxxxx header: You can use X-Sonar-passcode during database upgrade and when SonarQube is fully operational. Define X-Sonar-passcode in the sonar.properties file using the sonar.web.systemPasscode property.
• username:password and JWT token: When SonarQube is fully operational, system admins logged in with local or delegated authentication can access the endpoint.

For more information on deploying SonarQube on Kubernetes:

• For Community, Developer, and Enterprise Edition, see Deploy SonarQube on Kubernetes.
• For Data Center Edition, see Deploy a SonarQube Cluster on Kubernetes.