Spring Boot Actuator

Overview

Spring Boot Actuator is a set of production-ready features bundled with Spring Boot applications. These features allow you to monitor and manage your application’s behavior and health. Actuator provides various endpoints that expose valuable information about your application, such as health status, metrics, environment details, configuration properties, and more. It simplifies the task of monitoring and managing applications in production environments by offering a comprehensive set of endpoints out of the box. With Actuator, you can easily gather insights into your application’s performance and diagnose issues efficiently.

Add Dependency For Spring Boot Actuator

First, you need to include the actuator dependency in your pom.xml or build.gradle file:

For Maven:

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

For Gradle:

implementation 'org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-starter-actuator'

Accessing The Actuator Endpoints

Once you’ve added the dependency, Spring Boot automatically exposes several endpoints that you can access. For example:

• /actuator/health: Provides information about the health of your application.
• /actuator/info: Provides custom information about your application.
• /actuator/metrics: Exposes various metrics about your application.

You can configure additional endpoints and customize their behavior as needed.

Accessing Additional Actuator Endpoints

Configure Actuator Endpoints: You can enable or disable specific Actuator endpoints by setting properties in the application.properties file. Here are some common properties:

To enable all endpoints:

management.endpoints.web.exposure.include=*

To enable specific endpoints:

management.endpoints.web.exposure.include=health,info,metrics

To disable specific endpoints:

management.endpoints.web.exposure.exclude=beans,env

To customize endpoint paths:

management.endpoints.web.base-path=/actuator

To configure security for endpoints (Spring Security required):

management.endpoint.<endpoint-id>.access=<role>

Replace <endpoint-id> with the specific endpoint ID (e.g., health, info, metrics) and <role> with the required role for accessing the endpoint.

After making changes to the application.properties file, restart your Spring Boot application for the changes to take effect. By configuring these properties in the application.properties file, you can customize the Actuator endpoints according to your requirements, enabling or disabling them as needed and securing them if necessary.

Conclusion

In conclusion, Spring Boot Actuator offers a convenient way to monitor and manage your application by providing a set of production-ready features out of the box. By configuring properties in the application.properties file, you can customize Actuator endpoints, enabling or disabling specific endpoints, customizing endpoint paths, and securing endpoints as needed. These configurations allow you to tailor Actuator to your application’s requirements, ensuring that you have the necessary insights and control over your application’s behavior and health in production environments.

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