= Spring Boot - Actuator
Spring Boot Actuator includes a number of additional features to help you monitor and
manage your application when it's pushed to production. You can choose to manage and
monitor your application using HTTP or JMX endpoints. Auditing, health and metrics
gathering can be automatically applied to your application. The
https://docs.spring.io/spring-boot/docs/current/reference/htmlsingle/#production-ready[user guide]
covers the features in more detail.
== Enabling the Actuator
The recommended way to enable the features is to add a dependency to the
`spring-boot-starter-actuator` '`Starter`'. To add the actuator to a Maven-based project,
add the following '`Starter`' dependency:
[source,xml]
----
<dependencies>
<dependency>
<groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
<artifactId>spring-boot-starter-actuator</artifactId>
</dependency>
</dependencies>
----
For Gradle, use the following declaration:
[source]
----
dependencies {
implementation 'org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-starter-actuator'
}
----
== Features
* **Endpoints** Actuator endpoints allow 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 application health
information. Run up a basic application and look at `/actuator/health`.
* **Metrics** Spring Boot Actuator provides dimensional metrics by integrating with
https://micrometer.io[Micrometer].
* **Audit** Spring Boot Actuator has a flexible audit framework that will publish events
to an `AuditEventRepository`. Once Spring Security is in play it automatically publishes
authentication events by default. This can be very useful for reporting, and also to
implement a lock-out policy based on authentication failures.
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