spring-boot-actuator

Spring Boot Actuator enables production-grade monitoring by exposing health, metrics, and diagnostics endpoints. Add spring-boot-starter-actuator, expose endpoints via management properties, and configure Micrometer to export metrics to Prometheus or other registries for observability.

Actuator provides /health endpoints with customizable readiness and liveness groups for Kubernetes and container orchestration. Define probe groups in application properties, configure health indicators, and expose them securely to enable automated pod restart and traffic routing decisions.

Yes, Actuator management endpoints support separate security configuration independent of application routes. Configure management.endpoints.web.exposure and apply Spring Security rules to management traffic to restrict access by IP, role, or authentication method.

Micrometer integration in Actuator automatically formats metrics for Prometheus scraping. Expose the /metrics endpoint, configure Micrometer with custom metric tags, and point your Prometheus scraper to the management port to collect and visualize application performance data.

Actuator integrates with OpenTelemetry for distributed tracing across microservices. Enable tracing dependencies, configure exporters for Jaeger or other backends, and leverage Actuator's startup and httpexchanges endpoints to correlate traces with application diagnostics.

By default, only /health and /info endpoints are exposed over HTTP in production. Other diagnostic endpoints remain disabled unless explicitly exposed via management.endpoints.web.include, reducing security risk but limiting observability until you intentionally enable them.