Spring Boot actuators for microservices instrumentation

The previous sections explored most of the Spring Boot features required for developing a microservices. In this section, we will explore some of the production-ready operational aspects of Spring Boot.

Spring Boot actuators provide an excellent out-of-the-box mechanism for monitoring and managing Spring Boot microservices in production.

Create another Spring starter project, and name it as chapter3.bootactuator.application; this time, select the Web, HAL browser, hateoas, and Actuator dependencies. Similar to chapter3.bootrest , add a GreeterController endpoint with the greet method. Add management.security.enabled=false to the application.properties file to grant access to all endpoints.

Do the following to execute the application:

1. Start the application as Spring Boot App.
2. Point the browser to localhost:8080/application. This will open the HAL browser. Review the Links section.

A number of links are available under the Links section. These are automatically exposed by the Spring Boot actuator:

Some of the important links are listed as follows:

• dump: Performs a thread dump and displays the result
• mappings: Displays a list of all the http request mappings
• info: Displays information about the application
• health: Displays the health condition of the application
• autoconfig: Displays the auto configuration report
• metrics: Shows different metrics collected from the application

From the browser, individual endpoints are accessible using /application/<endpoint_name>. For example, to access the /health endpoint, point the browser to localhost:8080/application/health.