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Introduction to Spring Boot Actuator

Once you deploy a Spring application into a production cloud environment, you require immediate tools to inspect system health metrics (like RAM usage or active database connections).

Connecting generic external profiling tools securely is often tedious. Spring Boot Actuator solves this natively by exposing operational metrics directly over HTTP REST endpoints natively built identically straight into your running application.

Exploring APIs​

You simply attach the spring-boot-starter-actuator dependency to pom.xml.

By default organically, it automatically maps structural operational metrics to the /actuator URL boundary natively. It strictly exposes two primary default endpoints gracefully:

  • /actuator/health: Returns basic "UP" or "DOWN" system status correctly.
  • /actuator/info: Returns generic custom application metadata natively.

Exposing Additional Endpoints​

To view specific internal details properly, you explicitly expose additional metrics via application.properties:

# Exposes ALL possible endpoints cleanly onto the web routing interface optimally 
management.endpoints.web.exposure.include=*

You immediately gain reliable access natively properly to:

  • /actuator/beans: Returns a comprehensive list evaluating every uniquely registered Bean actively inside the IoC Container.
  • /actuator/mappings: Prints exactly all @RequestMapping paths systematically mapped natively on the web server safely.
  • /actuator/env: Dumps exact system OS variables intelligently identically.
  • /actuator/metrics/jvm.memory.used: Details exact RAM utilization securely effectively cleanly.