GraphQL federation is great to use when you want a single API/gateway for all your queries. The simple to-go approach is schema stitching, where you run a gateway microservice which targets all other microservices and composes a graph. This works initially fine, however over time you’d like schema checking, auto-polling for graph updates, seamless rollouts(no issues with schema stitching when rolling out) and overall a process that’s well integrated into your continuous integration and continuous delivery pipeline. The basic approach of schema stiching does not provide this, using managed federation provided by Apollo Studio improves the workflow and solves many of the pain points.

Apollo GraphQL and NestJS are gaining traction quickly, however the monitoring approaches are unclear. At the moment (late 2021 / early 2022) there are no default exporters or libraries for Prometheus metrics and the same goes for Grafana dashboards, this blog post will provide both. Just to ensure that you are aware - Apollo Studio provides metrics and many other features for your graphs. The only downside is you’ll most likely end up with a paid plan and you will be locked-in to their offering. Also, there is no way of exporting metrics to your Prometheus instance and centralizing alerting & dashboards.

This blog post will be based on a NestJS implementation for the dependency injection of Prometheus metrics, however it should work similarly in other setups.