Introduction

Spring Boot Actuator is a set of production-ready features that allow you to monitor and manage your Spring Boot application. It provides various out-of-the-box tools for gathering application metrics, monitoring application health, and interacting with the application at runtime. In this guide, we'll explore the core features of Spring Boot Actuator, complete with sample code and explanations.

Prerequisites

Before you start, make sure you have the following prerequisites:

• A Spring Boot project (if you don't have one, follow the "Building a Spring Boot Web Application" tutorial)
• An Integrated Development Environment (IDE) like Spring Tool Suite, IntelliJ IDEA, or Visual Studio Code

Enabling Spring Boot Actuator

To enable Spring Boot Actuator in your project, add the spring-boot-starter-actuator dependency to your pom.xml or build.gradle:

<dependencies>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
        <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-actuator</artifactId>
    </dependency>
</dependencies>
        

Actuator Endpoints

Spring Boot Actuator provides various built-in endpoints that expose information about your application. Some commonly used endpoints include:

• /actuator/health: Provides information about the application's health status.
• /actuator/info: Custom application-specific information.
• /actuator/metrics: Exposes various metrics about the application, such as memory usage, thread count, and more.
• /actuator/env: Displays environment properties and configuration.

You can access these endpoints by making HTTP requests to them, e.g., http://localhost:8080/actuator/health for the health endpoint.

Customizing Actuator Endpoints

You can customize and secure Actuator endpoints using configuration. For example, to change the health endpoint path and add security, you can add the following properties to your application.properties or application.yml:

# application.properties
management.endpoints.web.base-path=/manage
management.endpoint.health.show-details=when-authorized
        

This configuration changes the health endpoint path to /manage/health and only shows detailed health information when authorized.

Conclusion

Spring Boot Actuator is a powerful tool for monitoring and managing your Spring Boot applications in production. This guide provided an introduction to its core features, including enabling Actuator, exploring built-in endpoints, and customizing endpoint configurations. With Spring Boot Actuator, you can effectively manage and monitor your applications.