Metrics Dashboard

Note

The features described on this page are available in all Firely Server editions.

Firely Server includes a built-in Metrics Dashboard that provides an out-of-the-box observability experience. The dashboard visualizes key metrics collected via OpenTelemetry without requiring external tools or additional setup.

The dashboard is intended for:

  • Quick validation that Firely Server is operating correctly.

  • Immediate insights into request throughput, latencies, and error rates.

  • Environments where external monitoring solutions are not yet configured.

Note

The built-in dashboard is not designed to replace production-grade monitoring solutions such as Grafana or Application Insights. For long-term monitoring, analytics, and alerting, it is recommended to export telemetry data to an OpenTelemetry Collector and visualize it in a dedicated monitoring stack.

Important

Full support for the metrics dashboard requires Firely Server and Firely Server Ingest v6.5.0, and Firely Auth v4.5.0.

Available Metrics

The dashboard displays a curated set of server-level and instance-level metrics relevant to FHIR workloads:

Category

Description

Availability

Uptime and reachability of Firely Server and Firely Auth endpoints

System

Memory footprint of each Firely Server instance

System

CPU utilization of each Firely Server instance

Workload (configurable per instance / tenant / client_id)

Number of FHIR interactions in the last 5 minutes

Workload (configurable per instance / tenant / client_id)

Number of failed FHIR interactions in the last 5 minutes

Workload (configurable per instance / tenant / client_id)

Response time of FHIR interactions in the last 5 minutes

Resources

Number of resources stored per resource type

Resources

Current ingestion rate via REST API, FSI, or PubSub

Accessing the Dashboard

To access the Metrics Dashboard:

  1. Enable metrics in the configuration. See OpenTelemetry for details. The metrics dashboard ingests OTLP metrics from Firely Server, Firely Auth, and Firely Server Ingest. Each application must be configured separately.

  2. Configure the OpenTelemetry endpoint to point to the Firely Server Metrics Dashboard backend on port 7174 and start the backend service. Alternatively, configure the OpenTelemetry Collector to forward metrics to both the dashboard and Prometheus endpoints.

  3. Start Firely Server.

  4. Open the dashboard endpoint at https://example.org:7174/.

Note

Metrics become visible in the dashboard after approximately one minute. Metrics are cached for five minutes and discarded afterwards.

Example Use Cases

  • Health check: Verify responsiveness and request handling.

  • Development and testing: Monitor latency and error spikes without additional tooling.

  • Resource ingestion insights: Monitor Firely Server performance and ensure data ingestion without failures.