Ready for Production with Spring Boot Actuator

For far too many developers, running an application in production is an after thought. In big enterprises, as a developer, you write an application and then turn it over to another team. Someone else promotes your code into QA and then the operations guys eventually take your code to production.

Out of sight, out of mind right?

Wrong. Not so much anymore. The age of DevOps has really brought developers and operations closer together.

Spring Boot has introduced a tremendous amount of functionality to the Spring Framework. If you are building modern Spring Framework applications, you’re probably already using Spring Boot.

An awesome feature of Spring Boot is Spring Boot Actuator. 

If you’re a developer, Spring Boot Actuator brings you a set of tools you want to be using to help people in operations monitor your application.

Spring Boot Actuator is all about supporting and monitoring your application running production.

If you’re in operations, Spring Boot Actuator is a set of tools you want your developers to enable in their Spring Boot projects.

Spring Boot Actuator is a set of tools for monitoring and managing Spring Boot Applications as they run in production.

As the industry moves towards microservices deployed in containers, automated monitoring becomes more and more important.

Out of the box Spring Boot Actuator provides a health endpoint which can easily be wired into container orchestration tools, such as Kubernetes or Open Shift, which can be used to trigger alerting or automated self-healing.

But Spring Boot Actuator is much more than just a simple health end point.

In this course you will learn:

• About the available Spring Boot Actuator endpoints.
• How you can write your own custom endpoints.
• How to use Spring MVC to expose endpoints via HTTP.
• About the out of the box health checks provided by Spring Boot Actuator.
• How to write your own custom health check.
• How to show Git commit information on the Information endpoint.
• How to show build information on the Information endpoint.
• How to see system health metrics (memory, cache hits, disk usage, etc)
• How to add metrics to see your application activity (page views, or other custom actions)
• How to change log levels at runtime to aid troubleshooting.

When things go wrong in production, wouldn’t it be nice to know exactly what version of your code is running?

With Spring Boot Actuator, it’s simple to add information from your Git checkin or your Jenkins CI build. Then, you can go to the information endpoint and know exactly what version of the code is running in production.

As you troubleshoot a problem, sometimes you need to see more detailed log output. If you’re running in production, your logging levels are probably turned down to keep the logging overhead at a minimum.

What you need is a way to shell into your running application and change the log levels.

In this course, you will see exactly how you can shell into your running application to adjust the log levels.

If you’re deploying Spring Boot applications in today’s enterprise, Spring Boot Actuator is really a must have.