Chapter 16. Working with Spring Boot Actuator

Have you ever tried to guess what’s inside a wrapped gift? You shake it, weigh it, and measure it. And you might even have a solid idea as to what’s inside. But until you open it up, there’s no way of knowing for sure.

A running application is kind of like a wrapped gift. You can poke at it and make reasonable guesses as to what’s going on under the covers. But how can you know for sure? If only there were some way that you could peek inside a running application, see how it’s behaving, check on its health, and maybe even trigger operations that influence how it runs!

In this chapter, we’re going to explore Spring Boot’s Actuator. Actuator offers production-ready features such as monitoring and metrics to Spring Boot applications. Actuator’s features are provided by way of several endpoints, which are made available over HTTP as well as through JMX MBeans. This chapter focuses primarily on HTTP endpoints, saving JMX endpoints for chapter 19.

16.1. Introducing Actuator

In a machine, an actuator is a component that’s responsible for controlling and moving a mechanism. In a Spring Boot application, the Spring Boot Actuator plays that same role, enabling us to see inside of a running application and, to some degree, control how the application behaves.

16.2. Consuming Actuator endpoints

16.3. Customizing Actuator

16.4. Securing Actuator

Summary