👉 Overview
👀 What ?
Spring Boot Actuator is a sub-project of Spring Boot. It provides built-in endpoints that expose various information about your application, which are incredibly useful when you're writing a microservice architecture and you need to monitor your applications' health and metrics.
🧐 Why ?
Monitoring is crucial in a microservices architecture, because you have several services running at the same time, and you need to ensure they are all up and running fine. Spring Actuator provides essential features like health check and metrics gathering, which help in monitoring and managing your application. It also provides audit and tracing services, which are important for debugging and issue resolution.
⛏️ How ?
To use Spring Boot Actuator, you need to include its dependency in your project's build file. For Maven, add the spring-boot-starter-actuator dependency. Once the dependency is added, Actuator is enabled by default. You can access various endpoints provided by actuator by navigating to '/actuator' followed by the endpoint name. For instance, '/actuator/health' will give the health status of your application.
⏳ When ?
Spring Boot Actuator has been in use since the release of Spring Boot version 1.5. It has since become an integral part of Spring Boot applications, especially for production readiness.
⚙️ Technical Explanations
Spring Boot Actuator works by adding several production-grade services to your application with little effort on your part. It uses HTTP endpoints to enable you to monitor and interact with your application. Spring Boot includes a number of built-in endpoints and you can also add your own. For example, the 'health' endpoint provides basic health information about your application (Disk Space, DB and other custom checks), the 'info' might be used to return information about your application, and the 'metrics' shows several useful metrics information. Moreover, all these settings are highly customizable.