Understanding Spring Boot Actuator

Spring Boot Actuator is a set of production-ready features that help you monitor and manage your Spring Boot application. It provides several built-in endpoints and features for gathering information about your application, such as health, metrics, environment properties, and more. In this tutorial, we’ll explore the basics of Spring Boot Actuator and demonstrate how to use its features.

1. Setting up a Spring Boot Project

Start by creating a new Spring Boot project. You can use Spring Initializr (https://start.spring.io/) or your preferred IDE.

Make sure to include the following dependencies:

• Spring Web
• Spring Boot Actuator

2. Adding Actuator Endpoints

Spring Boot Actuator exposes various endpoints that you can use to monitor your application. The default set of endpoints includes /actuator/health, /actuator/info, /actuator/metrics, and more.

1. Open your application.properties or application.yml file and add the following configuration to enable all available endpoints: management: endpoints: web: exposure: include: "*" This configuration exposes all endpoints via HTTP.
2. Run your Spring Boot application.

3. Exploring Actuator Endpoints

Now that your application is running, you can explore the Actuator endpoints. Open your browser or use tools like curl or Postman to access the following URLs:

• Health endpoint: http://localhost:8080/actuator/health
• Info endpoint: http://localhost:8080/actuator/info
• Metrics endpoint: http://localhost:8080/actuator/metrics

4. Customizing Actuator Endpoints

You can customize which endpoints are exposed and configure their behavior.

1. Open your application.properties or application.yml file.
2. Add the following configuration to customize the endpoints:
3. This configuration exposes only the health and info endpoints and shows detailed health information.
4. Restart your application and explore the updated endpoints.
   

5. Creating Custom Actuator Endpoint

You can create custom Actuator endpoints to expose application-specific information.

1. Create a new class for your custom endpoint:
2. Ensure that your custom endpoint is discovered by Spring Boot by adding the @Component annotation to your class.
3. Restart your application and access the custom endpoint: http://localhost:8080/actuator/custom

Conclusion

Spring Boot Actuator provides a powerful set of tools for monitoring and managing your Spring Boot applications. This tutorial covered the basics of configuring and using Actuator endpoints, as well as creating custom endpoints. Explore the official documentation for more advanced features and options: https://docs.spring.io/spring-boot/docs/current/reference/html/actuator.html