Spring Boot Actuator is a sub-project of Spring Boot that provides several production-grade services to your application with little effort on your part. The actuator mainly exposes operational information about the running application, such as health, metrics, info, dump, env, etc. . It uses HTTP endpoints to expose this information, making it easy to monitor and manage the application.
To use Actuator in your application, you need to enable the spring-boot-actuator dependency in pom.xml. Spring Boot Actuator provides a list of available built-in endpoints that get enabled with the addition of the actuator dependency. However, in the latest versions, only two endpoints are enabled by default, /health and /info. You can also add your own custom actuator endpoints according to your needs.
Spring Boot Actuator is useful for monitoring and managing the application, and it provides several advantages, such as increasing customer satisfaction, reducing downtime, boosting productivity, improving cybersecurity management, and increasing the conversion rate. It is also easy to use and has a negligible impact on application memory and CPU usage.
In summary, Spring Boot Actuator is a sub-project of Spring Boot that provides several production-grade services to your application with little effort on your part. It mainly exposes operational information about the running application, uses HTTP endpoints to expose this information, and is useful for monitoring and managing the application.