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External Configuration Sources

In order to support the externalized configuration inspectIT Ocelot provides several methods. These methods represent a bridge between certain configuration providers and the inspectIT Ocelot agent. This way, a configuration can be provided from different sources, for example, file systems, the internet, external services, configuration services, vaults, etc.

The configuration method is considered dynamic if it supports run-time updates. For example, if the configuration file changes on disk, the file-based configuration method will report the updated properties to the inspectIT Ocelot agent. The agent will then update the internal configuration, effectively changing the behavior of the agent during the run-time.

Note that not all inspectIT Ocelot configuration properties support dynamic updates. In addition, the Java System properties and OS environment variables always have higher priority, thus dynamically changing a property which is also defined in those sources will have no effect.

All externalized configuration methods must be enabled using Java System properties or OS environment variables, as they are disabled by default. You can have more than one method active at the same time, thus pulling the configuration from different sources.

Method	Dynamic updates	Enabled by default
File-based Configuration	Yes	No
HTTP-based Configuration	Yes	No

File-based Configuration

The file-based configuration loads all .yaml/.yml, .json and .properties files in alphabetical order from the given directory path in non-recursive mode. The alphabetical order of files defines their priority, thus if the same property exists in my.properties and yours.properties files, then the one from the my.properties file will be used.

The file-based configuration is activated by specifying the path to an existing directory in the inspectit.config.file-based.path property. It automatically watches for changes in the given directory and reports updates to inspectIT Ocelot agent. If you would like to disable the dynamic updates you can set the inspectit.config.file-based.watch property to false. In addition it is possible to configure the frequency at which the agent checks the directory for changes. This is done by specifying the duration inspectit.config.file-based.frequency.

Property	Default	Description
inspectit.config.file-based.path	-	The path to the directory to scan for configuration files. An existing directory must be specified for the file-based configuration to be enabled.
inspectit.config.file-based.enabled	true	Can be used to disable the file-based configuration while the path is still specified.
inspectit.config.file-based.watch	true	If true the directory will be watched for changes. When changes occur, the configuration is dynamically updated.
inspectit.config.file-based.frequency	5s	Specifies the frequency at which the configuration directory will be checked for changes. When setting the frequency to zero, no polling is performed. Instead the agent listens for filesystem events published by the operating system to detect changes.

You must make sure that the access to your configuration directory is restricted in the same way you would restrict access to your application code or startup script. Otherwise the concept of actions of inspectIT Ocelot could make your application prone to code injection!

HTTP-based Configuration

The HTTP-based configuration periodically fetches a specified HTTP endpoint in order to receive the agent configuration. This configuration source can be used when using the inspectIT Ocelot Configuration Server.

Property	Default	Description
inspectit.config.http.url	-	The url of the http endpoint to query the configuration.
inspectit.config.http.enabled	true	Whether the http property source should be used.
inspectit.config.http.frequency	30s	The frequency of polling the http endpoint to check for configuration changes.
inspectit.config.http.attributes	service: ${inspectit.service-name}	The following attributes will be sent as http query parameters when fetching the configuration. These are used to map agents to certain configurations. See the section on Agent Mappings.

Due to security reasons, the HTTP-based configuration has the lowest priority, thus, cannot override configuration properties set by different configuration sources.