Spring Boot - Actuator

Spring Boot Actuator includes a number of additional features to help you monitor and manage your application when it’s pushed to production. You can choose to manage and monitor your application using HTTP or JMX endpoints. Auditing, health and metrics gathering can be automatically applied to your application. The user guide covers the features in more detail.

Enabling the Actuator

The recommended way to enable the features is to add a dependency to the spring-boot-starter-actuator ‘Starter’. To add the actuator to a Maven-based project, add the following ‘Starter’ dependency:

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

For Gradle, use the following declaration:

dependencies {
	implementation 'org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-starter-actuator'
}

Features

Endpoints Actuator endpoints allow you to monitor and interact with your application. Spring Boot includes a number of built-in endpoints and you can also add your own. For example the health endpoint provides basic application health information. Run up a basic application and look at /actuator/health.
Metrics Spring Boot Actuator provides dimensional metrics by integrating with Micrometer.
Audit Spring Boot Actuator has a flexible audit framework that will publish events to an AuditEventRepository. Once Spring Security is in play it automatically publishes authentication events by default. This can be very useful for reporting, and also to implement a lock-out policy based on authentication failures.