Spring Boot Actuator is a powerful tool for managing and monitoring Spring Boot applications. It provides production-ready features that help us keep track of the application’s health, metrics, environment details, and more – all without writing additional code. This makes it easier to maintain and ensure our application is running smoothly.
Features of Spring Boot Actuator
- Health Checks: Spring Boot Actuator exposes an endpoint that allows us to check the health of our application. We can customize the health check to include checks for database connectivity, external APIs, and more. The health endpoint is available by default at
/actuator/health. - Metrics: It provides a wealth of information regarding your application’s performance, including JVM stats, memory usage, active threads, HTTP request statistics, and more. Metrics are available at
/actuator/metrics. - Application Info: You can expose metadata about your application, such as build version, description, and custom information. This is useful for tracking deployments and versioning. The info endpoint is accessible at
/actuator/info. - Environment Details: Spring Boot Actuator allows you to expose environment-specific properties like system properties, configuration properties, and application settings through the
/actuator/envendpoint. - Logging: With Spring Boot Actuator, you can manage logging levels dynamically through HTTP endpoints, making it easy to change log settings without restarting the application.
Enabling Actuator in Spring Boot
To use Spring Boot Actuator, you need to include the spring-boot-starter-actuator dependency in your pom.xml or build.gradle file:
Maven:
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<dependency> <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId> <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-actuator</artifactId> </dependency> |
Gradle:
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dependencies { implementation 'org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-starter-actuator' } |
Once added, the actuator endpoints are automatically available, but you can customize which endpoints are exposed via the application.properties or application.yml file:
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management.endpoints.web.exposure.include=health,info,metrics |
Security Considerations
By default, Spring Boot Actuator exposes sensitive information, such as application health and metrics, over HTTP. It’s a good practice to secure these endpoints using Spring Security, especially in production environments.
