A health group is a focused subset of the Actuator health endpoint. It exposes a selected operational concern, especially whether an application should keep running or receive traffic. section 18.3.3
Spring Boot uses two groups for Kubernetes health decisions:
- Liveness reports whether the application is healthy enough to continue running. A down result can cause Kubernetes to restart its pod. section 18.3.3
- Readiness reports whether the application can receive traffic. It can remain down during initialization without causing a restart. section 18.3.3
management:
health:
probes:
enabled: true
Enable the built-in liveness and readiness groups with this application.yml setting. section 18.3.3
Connecting groups to Kubernetes
Configure Kubernetes probes to call /actuator/health/liveness and /actuator/health/readiness. During startup, publish ReadinessState.REFUSING_TRAFFIC; after initialization, publish ACCEPTING_TRAFFIC. Publish LivenessState.BROKEN when the application should be restarted, and LivenessState.CORRECT when it is healthy again. section 18.3.3
